Saudi Arabia-based FinTech company Lamaa has closed one of the country’s largest seed rounds, pulling in $5.5m.
The investment was led by Raed Ventures and Saudi Aramco’s entrepreneurship arm Wa’ed.
With the capital, Lamaa hopes to launch a B2B buy now, pay later service, which would be the first of its kind in the region. Expansion plans also include entering the Egypt, UAE and Qatar markets in the coming months.
Lamaa was founded by Sumeet Khutale, who has built an extensive experience with investment banking technology and cloud banking working at Barclays Capital and JP Morgan.
The company was founded to solve the funding gaps for SMEs in the region that struggle to access credit risk ratings due to their size. It offers supply chain finance to customers, which means they can upload their invoices to the marketplace and get paid early for them so they can use the cashflow for other parts of the business.
Since its launch in March 2021, the FinTech company has already onboarded 100 corporate clients and has a projection of over $1bn worth of invoices to be launched on its marketplace.
Raed Ventures founding partner Omar Almajdouie said, “What excites us about Lamaa is that it’s a great platform to empower SMEs in Saudi Arabia, and it’s managed by a well-experienced team led by Sumeet. For Lamaa, creating tremendous value from already-available cash will generate a win-win scenario in almost every transaction.”
Earlier in the year, buy now, pay later solution Tamara, which is headquartered in Saudi Arabia, closed the largest Series A round in the MENA region. The FinTech company raised $110m in funding, which was raised to support its expansion in the region.
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