Paymob, an Egyptian market-leading omni-channel merchant financial services platform, has grabbed $50 million in Series B funding. With this round, the total investment raised by the company to date accounts for $68.5 million.
Largest fintech round in Egypt
The investment round was led by Kora Capital, PayPal Ventures (that invested in Oyster), and Clay Point. Also, new investors, including Helios Digital Ventures, British International Investment, and Nclude participated in the funding round alongside existing investors – A15, FMO, and Global Ventures.
This funding round is the largest ever fintech Series B round in Egypt. Paymob will use the proceeds of this financing round to turbocharge the company by expanding its product range, reinforcing its leadership in the Egyptian market, and expanding into new markets across the Middle East and Africa region.
The investment comes as Paymob witnessed strong growth across the platform in 2021 with the number of merchants and monthly volumes grew by 4x year-on-year. It onboarded over 100,00 merchants in less than two and half years as part of its plan to reach 1 million SMEs across the region.
“We are thrilled to complete this significant fundraising with the support of such renowned international investors including, PayPal Ventures, the venture capital arm of a global pioneer in the digital payment space. It is a major endorsement of the strategy we have implemented to date and the scale of the opportunities we can harness.” said Islam Shawky, Paymob’s Co-founder, and CEO.
He added: “The Central Bank of Egypt initiatives that are continuously being introduced in the market to support fintech companies were key to Paymob’s growth. The Central Bank has created a regulatory framework to help fintech flourish and participate in making Egypt’s digital financial inclusion ambitions a reality.”
“Paymob shares our mission and ambition of advancing digital payments adoption – it has made impressive strides in supporting the growth and success of underserved SMBs,” said Ashish Aggarwal, Director, PayPal Ventures. “We’re honoured to be investing at a critical point in their journey, as Paymob scales game-changing solutions to bridge the fintech gap for businesses across the Middle East and Africa.”
“We are excited to partner with Paymob as they innovate at scale in the offline merchant acquiring and online payment gateway space,” said Nitin Saigal, Founder, Kora Management. “The Paymob team is leveraging key structural changes taking place across Egypt and the Middle East, as these economies evolve from being primarily cash-led to a digital heavy mode of transacting. We look forward to the road ahead.”
Merchants can accept digital payments
Paymob was founded by Islam Shawky, Alain El Hajj and Mostafa Menessy in 2015 in Egypt. It builds an omni-channel payment infrastructure to enable businesses to accept digital payments both online and in-store in addition to giving them better access to financial services. Paymob’s gateway has the largest number of payment methods in the Egyptian market in addition to conventional bank cards.
It added new payment methods such as mobile wallets, QR payments, bank cards’ instalments, Buy-Now Pay-Later (BNPL), and consumer finance payment options to support merchants in increasing their volume of transactions and growing revenues.
Recently, the fintech startup partnered with Mastercard to introduce Tap-on-Phone in Egypt, the first of its kind in the country. It will start replacing traditional point of sale devices. Paymob plans to launch cards for its merchants to enable B2B transactions and build tools for merchants to better manage and grow their business.
