Rain Financial, the Bahrain-headquartered cryptocurrency exchange backed by Paradigm and Kleiner Perkins, has acquired Digital Ma'arefa, the Saudi-based financial media company behind The Finance Memo, Crypto Memo, AI Memo and a broader newsletter and podcast network reaching more than one million followers and over 100,000 newsletter subscribers. The transaction closed on 30 March. Terms were not disclosed.
Digital Ma'arefa was founded in 2021 by Abdullah Mashat, Wael AlMutlaq and Abdullah Fageih. All three are joining Rain, with Mashat appointed Managing Director to help lead the exchange's regional expansion. The newsletters and news networks will continue operating unchanged. Mashat said the two teams share an ambition "to deliver trust at scale through a combination of financial media and regulated infrastructure." Rain co-founder AJ Nelson described Mashat as having built "the most trusted voice in crypto" and said the combined team's future is "very bright."
The deal follows a playbook that has become increasingly common across the crypto industry, where exchanges acquire media properties to build distribution and credibility with retail audiences. Bullish, the institutional exchange that went public on the NYSE in August 2025, acquired CoinDesk for $72.6 million in November 2023, giving it one of the most widely read crypto publications in the world ahead of its IPO. In the broader tech world, HubSpot's acquisition of The Hustle newsletter in 2021 demonstrated the same logic: buying an audience that already trusts a media brand is faster and cheaper than building one through performance marketing.
Rain was founded in 2017 by Abdullah Almoaiqel, Nelson, Joseph Dallago and Yehia Badawy. The company entered the Central Bank of Bahrain's regulatory sandbox that year and in 2019 became the first licensed crypto-asset service provider in the Middle East. It is also licensed by ADGM in Abu Dhabi. The company raised $6 million in a Series A led by MEVP in January 2021, followed by a $110 million Series B co-led by Paradigm and Kleiner Perkins at a $500 million valuation in January 2022, with Coinbase Ventures, Global Founders Capital, MEVP, Cadenza Ventures and JIMCO participating. Rain says it now serves more than two million users and has processed over $11 billion in total trading volume. In April 2024, the exchange lost $16.13 million in a security breach attributed by the US Department of Justice to North Korea's Lazarus Group.
Saudi Arabia, where Digital Ma'arefa's audience is concentrated, remains a complicated market for crypto. A government committee declared virtual currencies illegal in 2018 and SAMA has repeatedly warned against trading them, but there are no criminal penalties for individuals who do, and Saudi residents routinely access international exchanges including Rain (via its Bahrain licence) and Binance (via its UAE-regulated entity). The Capital Market Authority announced in late 2025 that it is developing a comprehensive digital asset regulatory framework expected for public consultation in the second half of 2026, which could open the door to domestic licensing for the first time.
