Tarabut secures $50M from Saudi banks and business groups as it deepens Kingdom focus

Bahrain-founded financial infrastructure company Tarabut has secured $50 million in strategic financing from a group of Saudi banks and family business groups, as it concentrates more of its business on embedded lending and credit decisioning in the Kingdom.

Riyad Bank, the X-Tech Fund managed by SAB Invest and GIB Saudi Arabia participated alongside Zamil Group, Kanoo Ventures and other regional institutions. The transaction remains subject to regulatory approvals including from the Saudi Central Bank.

The financing is its largest disclosed since a $32 million Series A in 2023 led by Pinnacle Capital, with Visa, Tiger Global and Aljazira Capital participating. That round was also explicitly pitched around expanding Tarabut’s Saudi business, and followed $25 million raised across seed and pre-Series A rounds in 2021.

Tarabut opened its regional HQ in Riyadh last September after saying it has reached connectivity with all major Saudi banks. It already works with institutions including Saudi National Bank, Alinma Bank and SAB, while GIB was among the financial institutions represented at the headquarters opening.

Its Saudi products have also moved beyond the original open banking proposition of allowing businesses to access customer-permissioned bank data.

American Express Saudi Arabia began using Tarabut last year to assess requests for credit-limit increases using open banking data, including from self-employed and non-salaried customers. SNB separately announced an SME point-of-sale lending product powered by Tarabut and distributed through payments company Geidea, while Tarabut has also partnered with SAB on embedded finance.

The company says it’s now processed more than 5 billion API calls across Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain.

Its latest financing is aimed primarily at taking that infrastructure further into lending, where Tarabut sits between financial institutions and the platforms through which businesses or consumers encounter credit. Rather than lending from its own balance sheet, its technology uses real-time financial data to help banks verify customers, make credit decisions and distribute financing through third-party platforms.

The focus is increasingly on SMEs. Saudi SME lending reached SAR489.2 billion in the first quarter of 2026, up 28% from a year earlier, even as underwriting smaller businesses remains comparatively labour-intensive for lenders that still rely heavily on financial statements and other static documentation.

“The biggest prize is SME finance,” founder and chief executive Abdulla Almoayed said. “Financial institutions want to serve more creditworthy businesses, and our infrastructure helps them turn real financial behaviour into a clearer picture for decision-making.”

The shift has been accompanied by acquisitions broadening the technology underneath the platform. Tarabut bought UK A2Apayments company Vyne in 2024, adding payment initiation to its open banking infrastructure, before acquiring Bahrain AI engineering company Servable earlier this year to add synthetic data, model training and AI-driven decisioning tools for regulated financial institutions.

Saudi Arabia has meanwhile become a more competitive market for the infrastructure providers sitting underneath lenders. Lean Technologies, Tarabut’s principal regional rival, became the first company to receive a full SAMA open banking licence in March and says it serves more than 350 enterprise customers across Saudi Arabia and the UAE after raising $67.5 million from General Catalyst and others in 2024.