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Beehive Group Holdings has completed the acquisition of a majority stake in Themar Al Aamal Commercial Company, the holding company of the SAMA-regulated Saudi debt crowdfunding platform Themar, first signalled through a non-binding offer letter last September.
The acquisition makes Beehive the first digital SME financing platform regulated across three GCC markets, the UAE, Oman and Saudi Arabia, and closes alongside a company milestone of more than 3,000 SMEs financed across the region since its 2014 founding.
Themar, co-founded by Yousef Al Dabbagh, received its SAMA licence in August 2023 as the Kingdom's seventh authorised debt crowdfunding platform, and offers Sharia-compliant purchase financing for SMEs. Beehive has operated in Saudi Arabia since 2020 through banking partnerships, and the deal converts that presence into a regulated platform of its own, in a market where the two companies have previously pointed to an SME financing gap of SAR 500 billion ($133 billion).
"With Themar, we are moving from a partnership-led presence to a regulated platform in the Kingdom, giving us a stronger foundation to scale access to financing for Saudi SMEs," said Peter Tavener, Beehive's co-founder and group CEO. Al Dabbagh said Beehive brings "the regional scale, the technology, and the institutional relationships to open up a new level of capital access for Saudi businesses."
Beehive also plans to replicate in Saudi Arabia the structured funding facility it arranged with Goldman Sachs and Magellan Capital in the UAE, expanding its SME funding capacity in the Kingdom beyond retail and institutional investors on the platform.
Founded in Dubai in 2014 by Craig Moore, Beehive was MENA's first P2P lending platform regulated by the DFSA, connecting businesses seeking finance with investors as an alternative to bank credit. Abu Dhabi's e& enterprise, the enterprise arm of telecoms group e&, acquired a majority stake in the company in 2023, and Beehive entered Oman through a partnership with Future Fund Oman and Sohar International.
The deal lands in a busy stretch for Saudi SME finance, arriving in the same week that Tabby secured consumer and SME finance licences from SAMA, adding working capital for retailers to its consumer offering, as the Kingdom's regulator widens the field of licensed non-bank lenders chasing the SME gap Vision 2030 has prioritised.
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