Orbii raises $3.6 million Prosus-led seed to power SME lending for Saudi banks and fintechs

For years the pitch to Middle East lenders has been about doing more with less. Orbii, a Riyadh startup barely a year old, has just convinced some of the region's most watched investors that the missing piece isn't another lender but the plumbing underneath one. The company announced a $3.6 million seed round led by Prosus Ventures, with VentureSouq, DASH Ventures, Taz Investments and Sanabil 500 participating — a small cheque by Gulf standards, but a telling one for anyone tracking where Saudi fintech capital is flowing.

Orbii was founded in 2024 by Nauman Ali, Guillaume Kieffer and Nasara Mughal. Its product is credit infrastructure: AI-driven software that bolts directly into a bank's or fintech's existing systems — core banking, point-of-sale, ERP — and automates underwriting, disbursement and loan monitoring in real time. The claim at the centre of the pitch is speed: raw financial data in, lending decisions out in seconds. The platform already covers salary advances, merchant financing, working capital, embedded lending and buy-now-pay-later, and builds borrower profiles from more than 1,000 derived financial metrics spanning cash runway, behavioural risk and repayment capacity. It says it has processed thousands of applications and powered millions of dollars in approved loans.

The money is earmarked for hiring engineers and data scientists, deepening integrations with financial systems across the region, and pushing further into Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Ali's framing is deliberately infrastructural rather than consumer-facing: a MENA where credit decisioning stops being a process and becomes a reflex, embedded in the workflows businesses already use. Prosus's Robin Voogd pointed to implementation speed and the team's depth as the reasons the Dutch technology investor led the round — notable given Prosus's track record of backing category-defining platforms globally.

To understand why this resonates in Riyadh, you need the local backdrop. Saudi Arabia's SME sector is the spine of the kingdom's Vision 2030 diversification drive, yet access to credit remains the perennial bottleneck — banks have historically preferred large corporate and government exposure, leaving smaller firms to patch together informal financing. The government has pushed hard to change that, and a wave of digital lenders and embedded-finance players has rushed in. What most of them lack is the unglamorous machinery: underwriting engines, data pipelines, risk scoring. Orbii is selling exactly that, to banks and fintechs alike, rather than competing with them for borrowers.

The presence of Sanabil 500, an arm tied to Saudi sovereign wealth capital, alongside regional VCs and a global tech investor, says something about how the kingdom's startup stack is maturing. Gulf venture money is no longer just chasing consumer apps; it is funding the back-end infrastructure that makes lending scalable and, crucially, auditable. For international readers, the signal is that Saudi fintech is moving from headline-grabbing neobanks toward the quieter layer where credit actually gets decided — and where margins and defensibility tend to live.

The test now is execution. Orbii has set itself the target of powering $1 billion in SME loans by 2026, a figure that will depend on how quickly it can win over conservative bank risk committees and integrate with legacy systems that were never built for real-time decisioning. If it delivers, the $3.6 million will look like a bargain entry point into a market where the real prize is not the app on a merchant's phone but the engine deciding whether the loan goes through.