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Paymob has raised $35 million in a pre-Series C round co-led by Abu Dhabi sovereign investor Mubadala and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, two years after EBRD led an extension to the Egyptian payments company’s Series B.
British International Investment, Global Ventures and DPI Ventures also participated. The funding will be used to expand across MENA and develop new products for small businesses, including tools aimed at AI-powered commerce.
The round brings Paymob’s disclosed funding to more than $125 million and adds Mubadala to a shareholder base that already includes PayPal Ventures, Kora Capital, Clay Point, FMO, A15 and Global Ventures.
Paymob raised $50 million in 2022 in a Series B led by Kora Capital, PayPal Ventures and Clay Point, taking its funding at the time to more than $68.5 million. EBRD then led a $22 million extension in September 2024, alongside Endeavor Catalyst and existing investors, bringing the Series B to $72 million.
The latest financing follows a marked change in where Paymob is generating its growth.
Consolidated revenue has tripled over the past 18 months, while revenue from the GCC has increased sevenfold and now accounts for close to half of the group total.
That compares with 2024, when the company was still describing Egypt as its profitable core market. At the time of its Series B extension, Paymob said revenue in Egypt had grown sixfold since its original 2022 Series B.
Founded in Cairo in 2015 by Islam Shawky, Alain El Hajj and Mostafa Menessy while they were still university students, Paymob initially built payments infrastructure for an Egyptian market where accepting digital payments online remained cumbersome. It has since expanded into the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman.
Its GCC expansion accelerated after entering the UAE in 2023 and securing a Retail Payment Services licence from the Central Bank of the UAE in January 2025. Paymob says it has since onboarded roughly 20,000 merchants across its three GCC markets.
The company now serves more than 390,000 merchants across MENA, up from roughly 350,000 when it last raised funding in 2024. Its platform gives merchants access to more than 60 payment methods through a single integration, spanning cards and local payment networks to BNPL and bank instalment products.
Mubadala is investing through its MENA Venture Capital Fund, which sits within the sovereign investor’s UAE Investments Platform. The fund has increasingly been used to back technology companies expanding their presence in the Emirates, with Mubadala citing Paymob’s UAE business and wider GCC growth as part of the rationale for its investment.
The new capital will also fund a broader product push around Paymob’s merchant base. The company is developing new SME products and says it wants its payments infrastructure to support “agentic commerce”, where AI agents can discover products and initiate purchases on behalf of consumers.
“Paymob morphed into a regional platform over the past 18 months, propelled by the exponential growth of our GCC business,” Shawky said.
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