Mubadala and EBRD Back Paymob's $35 Million Push to Wire MENA's Payments Rails

Paymob, the payments infrastructure firm born in Cairo and now chasing Gulf growth, 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. British International Investment, Global Ventures and DPI Ventures also joined. For anyone tracking where Gulf sovereign capital is placing its fintech bets, this is a telling allocation: not a consumer app, but the unglamorous plumbing that lets merchants get paid.

The numbers behind the raise explain the interest. Paymob says consolidated revenues grew threefold across its four markets over the past 18 months, while GCC revenues expanded sevenfold. Close to half of total revenue now comes from the Gulf. Since securing a Retail Payment Services Licence from the Central Bank of the UAE in January 2025, the company has onboarded roughly 20,000 merchants across its three GCC markets. It serves more than 390,000 merchants in Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman. The round lifts total disclosed funding past $125 million, after a $50 million Series B in 2022 and a $22 million extension led by the EBRD in 2024.

Founded in 2015 by Islam Shawky, Alain El Hajj and Mostafa Menessy, Paymob occupies a niche that outsiders often underestimate. A merchant in MENA who wants to accept payments online and in person typically needs seven or eight methods — buy-now-pay-later providers, local card networks, bank instalment plans — each with its own integration, negotiation and settlement cycle. Paymob collapses that into one contract, one API and a single dashboard covering more than 60 payment methods. That is the pitch: less reconciliation pain, more sales.

The investor mix says as much as the cheque. Mubadala is Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth vehicle, and its participation runs through a MENA venture fund aimed at deepening the UAE's digital economy. Ali Eid Al Mheiri, an executive director on Mubadala's UAE investments platform, framed Paymob as a way to support merchants, advance financial inclusion and diversify the economy. The EBRD, meanwhile, has backed the company since 2024 and describes it as building infrastructure MENA's SME economy has been missing. British International Investment adds a development-finance flavour. This is sovereign and multilateral money betting on regional scale, not a quick exit.

For the wider Middle East, the deal signals a maturing thesis. Gulf capitals are no longer content to fund local champions only; they want platforms that straddle Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman, capturing the region's fragmented markets through a single operating layer. Paymob's own trajectory — Egyptian roots, Gulf-led revenue, Abu Dhabi on the cap table — mirrors how capital now moves across the region, following talent and merchants rather than borders. Fintech remains one of the few sectors where a startup can plausibly claim to knit these markets together.

The new capital is earmarked for scaling digital payments acceptance across MENA and building products for SME merchants and so-called agentic commerce — transactions initiated by AI agents rather than humans. That is a forward bet on how software, not people, will increasingly shop and pay. If Paymob can convert its Gulf momentum into durable margins, this round may read less like a bridge and more like a launchpad.