Egyptian FinTech startup Paymob completed an $18.5m Series A led by Dubai-based VC firm Global Ventures.
Other investors, including Egyptian investment fund A15 and Dutch development bank FMO, also participated in the round.
In July last year, the firm closed $3.5m in funding before raising an additional $15m to complete its Series A investment.
Founded in 2015 by Islam Shawky, Alain El Hajj and Mostafa El Menessy, Paymob provides a platform to facilitate customer payments for merchants through its unique payment APIs. The startup also offers a POS solution for offline merchants to easily receive card payments.
According to Shawky, Paymob plans to leverage its new funding to expand into more Sub-Saharan African countries as well as other regions including Saudi Arabia. Apart from Egypt, Kenya is the only other African country where Paymob currently holds operations alongside other countries including Pakistan and Palestine.
Furthermore, Paymob aims to empower underserved SMEs with improved digital payments offerings as part of the Central Bank of Egypt’s efforts and initiatives towards nationwide digital financial inclusion.
“This latest capital raise will accelerate our progress to reducing the digital payments bottleneck,” Shawky said.
Given that the coronavirus pandemic caused a surge in cashless transactions, the FinTech company capitalised on the rising demand for digital payments and processed over $5bn worth of payment transactions from over 35,000 local and international merchants such as Swvl, Tradeline, Breadfast and LG. According to the company, 85% of mobile wallets transactions carried out in Egypt are processed by its infrastructure.
Paymob’s Series A comes just a couple of days after Egypt’s VC firm Algebra Ventures launched a $90m fund geared towards financing early-stage startups in the country. Moreover, VC company, Sawari Ventures too secured a $63.8m investment proving that the FinTech ecosystem is gaining much traction.
Commenting on the round, Global Ventures general partner Basil Moftah said, “Paymob has a perfect combination of high-quality technology, products customers increasingly cannot do without, and an outstanding management team
“Their market opportunity is also huge; Egypt’s transformation to a cashless society is being enabled by the unique products Paymob has built.”
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