Nauman Ali on Orbii's $3.6M Seed round, the death of credit scores, and establishing trust with lenders

At 12 years old, Nauman Ali was running a market stall. By 14, he was working in a computer shop, technically “volunteering” underage. At 16, he was juggling two jobs: one at Microsoft, another in community IT.

By his early twenties he’d added stints at the Bank of England and Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi. That mix of technology and financial systems gave him a front-row view of how institutions handled risk, and how often small businesses were left outside the system.

Today, the gap has only widened. Across Saudi Arabia and the UAE, SMEs face a $340 billion financing shortfall, with only about 7% of that demand being met despite record business formation and an influx of capital needing deployment.

To close that gap, in 2024, Ali co-founded a credit intelligence layer  called Orbii with Nasara Mughal and Guillaume Kieffer.

What began with cold approaches to lenders in DIFC food courts has become a platform serving 21 customers across two markets.

The premise is simple – credit scores no longer reflect reality. Orbii instead uses live data, hyper-contextual models, and embedded workflows to help lenders evaluate SMEs in minutes, not weeks.

Backed by a $3.6 million Seed round led by Prosus Ventures, alongside VentureSouq, Dash Ventures, Taz Investments and Sanabil 500, Orbii is scaling its infrastructure to become the intelligence layer behind SME lending in the Gulf.

In this interview, Ali explains how his early experiences shaped the mission, why defaults can be reduced to near zero, and what a post–credit score world could look like for businesses across the region.

You started working in a computer shop at just 14, went on to Microsoft and even spent some time at the Bank of England. How did those experiences ultimately lead you to Orbii?

Academically I’m a computer scientist, and started my professional career at Microsoft. But my entrepreneurial journey really began earlier, when I was about 11. Due to an unfortunate family situation, and as the eldest sibling I suddenly had to help take care of my three younger brothers and sisters. We went from being comfortable to not so comfortable, and from then on I did whatever I could to contribute.

At 12, I ran my first market stall. At 14, I was working in a computer shop, “volunteering” at first. By 16, I had two jobs: one at Microsoft and another in community IT work. I tried a lot of things while growing up.

Later, I did a short stint at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi around the Brexit period. When I returned to the UK, something pulled me back around the COVID period, I wanted to explore the region again. Being a technologist, I felt like a bit of an outlier among most startup founders here, since many don’t come from tech backgrounds.

I spoke to startups like  Lean, Dapi, and others, just to understand the technology supporting the financial infrastructure. Data has always been my forte, and the more I dug in, the clearer it became that the real need was credit intelligence within the B2B sector.

We camped out in DIFC, looking for key people within the space, waiting for them before they walked into the office. At lunchtime we’d approach people in food courts: “What’ keeps you up at night? What’s your biggest pain point?” Cold outreach didn’t work, so we became creative about opportunities to talk to  people face-to-face.

That’s how we built relationships and discovered how broken the lending system really was. There’s so much capital that needs to be deployed, especially in the B2B space, if the UAE, Saudi, and the GCC are going to get where they need to be.

That’s when I called Guillaume, one of my co-founders, who was in France at the time. I said, “Dude, I think I’m onto something.” He was bored during COVID, so he took the next flight to Dubai. We started white-boarding ideas. Then we reached out to Nasara, someone we’d worked with in London, and she came out to join us. That’s how it started.

We built a very basic POC focused on data collection services for lenders, because that was the immediate pain point. From there, we started building the rest of the stack. We’re AI nerds, so it was natural to extend into that. And here we are today, 21 customers across two markets, the UAE and Saudi. There’s still so much to build, but we’re excited about what’s ahead.

You quantified the B2B lending market shortfall at around $250 billion, with maybe only 9% of that addressed between Saudi and the UAE?

That’s right. But it’s actually $340 billion now – that’s grown by 44% year-on-year. The $250 billion figure was from 2023. It’s because of the sheer influx of businesses being created, and the greater need for capital to support them. But only about 7% of that is being addressed.

Within that massive gap, what’s the initial wedge for Orbii? Are there particular verticals where you’ve got the data access, regulatory clarity, and appetite from lenders?

Our focus has mainly been on SMEs i.e. getting capital into the hands of small and medium businesses. That can mean anything from micro-loans of 50,000 dirhams to facilities up to 5 million.

We started with short-term loans because that’s where the pain was sharpest. Imagine spending two or three weeks making a credit decision for a loan that only lasts 30 or 45 days, it just doesn’t make sense. So we built the intelligence layer to handle those short-term cases first.

From there, we expanded to support longer-term lending: three months, six months, twelve months, even larger capital loans. Today, our platform can augment credit decisions across the full spectrum, short-term or long-term, while still focusing purely on the B2B space.

One of the things I noted while preparing is your point about credit scores “dying.” You’ve argued for dynamic, real-time, context-aware decisioning instead of the old backward-looking credit score. How does that change things – credit committee behaviour, pricing for SMEs?

I think we’re heading toward a world where SMEs won’t need to apply for credit at all. That’s why I say credit decisioning and credit scoring are going to die. Credit eligibility for a business will become an always-on process, embedded within SME workflows.

So whether you’re a logistics company, connected to POS systems, ERP software, or invoice management tools, given the intelligence we have today, you’ll simply press a button and unlock capital directly within those workflows. You won’t need to go to a lender in the traditional sense. 

That’s our vision: Orbii as the intelligent, invisible layer powering B2B lending, where credit is available at a single click.

It’s long overdue to deliver that kind of experience for SMEs. Having gone through the struggle myself as a young entrepreneur, always chasing the next idea but never having enough capital, that frustration ultimately led me here.

What does the customer journey actually look like?

From a lending standpoint, it’s super seamless. We’ve built  foundational models from scratch, our own proprietary models, and then verticalised contextual models. To put it simply, we have a model for the various sources of financial data sources. 

That’s because each source presents data differently, there’s no uniform standard. Whether it’s a bank statement, open banking feeds, ERPs, POS systems, sales platforms, the structure of data can vary dramatically.

Our intelligence is accessible through easy to integrate APIs. we pull the data from the data source and run it through our models, and within about three and a half to four minutes we generate the full insights and analytics package for the lender, ready for a credit decision.

From the borrower’s perspective, there are no forms to fill in, its completely seamless.. The lender gets over a thousand data points in minutes. 

We don’t underwrite any loans ourselves, we purely provide the tech and the augmentation. And it’s not just about approvals. Beyond the initial decision, we also alert lenders in real time if there are behavioural changes in a borrower’s profile. That’s one of the key features of our platform.

We believe defaults are going to become a thing of the past. Loans need to evolve based on how an SME is actually performing.

Take a flower shop in Abu Dhabi. In the middle of summer, they’re not going to sell many flowers. If that business is stuck with a fixed repayment schedule during those months, it’s not really fair. It’s not that the business is failing, it’s just the weather.

So we factor in all types of parameters that could influence the business. Then we recommend: this is how much to approve, these are the terms, and this is how repayment should look. If anything changes, we update the lender in real time.

How do you establish trust with lenders? How do you actually demonstrate the value?

We offer our customers the freedom to test drive our system. We demonstrate value with their data that is tangible for them, identifying risk, upselling opportunities and how they can maximise their loan book. 

We’ve demonstrated clear value for our customers: 

We always say: don’t take our word for it, test us with your own data. And when they do, we usually turn results around very quickly.

Can you talk a bit about the business model?

So last year, and even early this year, we ran a bunch of experiments. We came to the conclusion that SaaS, as we know it, is evolving. The signals we’re seeing point toward a success-based model.

In practice, that means if our engine approves a loan and the lender underwrites it, then we get paid. We’ve got skin in the game. We charge a percentage of the overall loan amount.

from a customer’s standpoint, that actually builds trust. Effectively their success results on our collective success.

So you’ve raised the Seed round, what’s next? Expanding coverage? Hiring?

We’re a very lean team right now, six people, including the three co-founders. We need to scale our engineering team and across machine learning. 

we’re hiring on the commercial side now, I always felt that if I, as a tech person, couldn’t train myself to sell the product, then I had no business hiring a sales team. It was way out of my comfort zone at first, but now I actually enjoy it. Still, the time has come to bring in specialists. 

So most of the capital from this round is going towards building out tech teams, continue innovation within ML and AI, and growing the operations across the UAE and KSA market.  side, by bringing in commercial and technical superstars.

What was 500 Sanabil’s accelerator like?

For me, it was amazing. Coming from a tech background, the real value was in learning the non-tech side. The product and engineering work, we know that quite well, even before Orbii. But the program gave me exposure to growth hacking

It was also a fantastic entry into the Saudi market.. The mentors were incredible,So it was hugely valuable.

The team is truly like the friends always backing your corner. Amal, Abdulrahman – I can rely on them to give me advice whenever I need it. Calling it an accelerator almost undersells it. It’s more than that. For me, it was transformational. I came out of it thinking: if I can’t take Orbii to new heights after this, then the issue is me.

I also remembered your point earlier about monthly investor updates. That’s something I’ve been hearing more about—more founders seem to be doing it to great effect. What did that actually look like for you?

I first spoke to Jon from OCTA late last year in Riyadh. He told me: “You need to take investor updates seriously.”

At the same time, I saw the other approach. For example, founders sending hundreds of  cold emails to investors globally and regionally. Every single day, knocking on doors. I thought: that’s brutal.

I wanted to curate a list of VCs. So I built a database and started sending updates. I split it into two lists: friends of Orbii and investors of Orbii. The investors list started with a few angel checks we had early on, and then I added the investors I really wanted to target.

Each update shared real numbers, and if they were genuinely interested, they’d read it and respond. That meant they were genuinely  engaged with what we were building.

And that’s how we got the cap table we wanted: Prosus, global tech leaders, VentureSouq, fintech OGs, Dash Ventures. All really founder-friendly, super-connected people and we are very grateful for being aligned on a shared vision for Orbii.