Qatar’s Rasmal bets on Yuno to wire the Gulf into global payments

For a region that likes to buy its way into the future, Qatar just made a quieter, more telling bet. Rasmal Ventures, the Doha-based firm backed by the Qatar Investment Authority, has put money into Yuno, a Colombian payments infrastructure company that just closed a $45 million Series B. The headline number is modest by Gulf standards, but the move says something larger: the Gulf is no longer just a market to sell into, but a launchpad to build from.

Yuno, founded in 2022 by Juan Pablo Ortega and Julián Núñez, does the unglamorous but essential work of letting businesses accept payments anywhere. Through a single API, it connects merchants to more than 1,000 payment methods across 190 countries, with intelligent routing and AI-driven fraud detection layered on top. The round was led by Global PayTech Ventures, with heavy hitters like Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global joining in. Rasmal came in as a strategic regional investor, alongside GrowthX Capital and Abu Dhabi’s Further Ventures. The company says its network recovered over $5 billion in failed transactions last year and lifted authorisation rates by about 5 percent — numbers that matter more than buzzwords to anyone who has watched a checkout page kill a sale.

What makes this deal interesting is where Yuno is planting its flag. The company has set up its GCC regional office in Qatar, earned a payment technical service provider certification from the Saudi Central Bank, and partnered with Tap Payments and Tabby to plug into local rails like Mada, KNET, and NAPS across all six Gulf states. That is not accidental. The Gulf is the world’s fastest-growing real-time payments market, according to ACI Worldwide, and the trade corridors linking the Gulf to Asia are becoming digital highways for money as much as goods. Yuno’s founder, Ortega, knows this terrain — he previously built Rappi, Colombia’s first unicorn, and GrowthX’s Hamad Al Hajri, who has known him since those days, openly calls Yuno his next unicorn, built from the GCC.

For Rasmal, this is not a passive cheque. The firm, positioned as Qatar’s first institutionally backed investment house, has built its reputation on bringing value to Gulf companies before deploying capital — helping them prepare for investment rather than simply funding them. With Yuno, Rasmal’s partner Soumaya Ben Beya Dridje frames it as backing a team that has solved the hardest problem in payments: being genuinely local everywhere. That is a rare compliment from a Gulf investor, where most foreign startups arrive with a PowerPoint and a prayer.

The broader signal is about how Gulf capital is maturing. For years, sovereign wealth funds from Doha to Abu Dhabi poured money into global tech giants and real estate trophies. Now, the smart money is moving toward infrastructure that connects the region to the world — and the world to the region. Yuno’s decision to make Qatar its hub is a small but concrete vote of confidence in Doha’s ambition to be a fintech gateway, not just an energy exporter. The certification from Saudi Arabia and the partnerships with Tabby and Tap show that the company is not treating the Gulf as an afterthought, but as a core market.

Looking ahead, Yuno says it is raising to meet customer growth, not to buy it, with a clear line to profitability in the coming year. That discipline, paired with a global network, is exactly what Gulf investors increasingly want: companies that can scale across the new trade corridors without burning through cash. For Qatar, the payoff is twofold — a strategic stake in a company that could define how money moves across Asia and the Gulf, and a proof point that Doha can attract and nurture serious global fintech talent. The region has long been a place where money is spent; deals like this suggest it is becoming a place where money is built.