Paymob Raises $35M Pre-Series C Co-Led by Mubadala and EBRD

Paymob, the Egyptian omnichannel payments company, has raised $35 million in a pre-Series C round co-led by Mubadala Investment Company and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, bringing its total raised to over $125 million.

The investor list

British International Investment, Global Ventures and DPI Ventures also participated. The round follows a $50 million Series B in 2022 and a $22 million extension in 2024.

Mubadala and the EBRD co-leading is a specific kind of signal. One is an Abu Dhabi sovereign investor mandated to build regional financial infrastructure; the other is a development bank that measures success partly by SME formalization. Both are patient capital, and both bring regulatory relationships that matter more in payments than in most software categories.

The numbers behind the raise

Paymob was founded in 2015 and now serves roughly 390,000 merchants across Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman. Consolidated revenues tripled over the past 18 months. GCC revenues grew sevenfold and now represent nearly half of the total.

That last figure is the story. Paymob is an Egyptian company whose growth engine has become the Gulf. Since securing its UAE Retail Payment Services License in January 2025, it has onboarded about 20,000 merchants across GCC markets—a license-led expansion rather than a gradual one.

The logic is straightforward. Egypt gave Paymob scale, merchant density and a hard operating education in a market where cash still dominates.

The Gulf offers higher average transaction values, faster digital adoption, and better unit economics on the same infrastructure.

What the platform does

Paymob runs a single integration layer that lets businesses accept online and offline payments across more than 60 payment methods. For a small merchant in a market with fragmented payment rails — local cards, wallets, bank transfers, cash on delivery — that consolidation is the entire value proposition.

"Paymob built the payments infrastructure MENA's SME economy needed — a scalable layer removing merchant friction," an EBRD representative said.

Where the money goes

The company plans further MENA expansion, scaling its payments acceptance business, new SME-focused products, and — notably — building for agentic commerce.

That last line is the forward-looking bet: payments infrastructure for transactions initiated by AI agents rather than humans tapping a checkout button. It is early, and much of the industry is still arguing about how authorization and dispute resolution should work when the buyer is software. A co-founder said the round will "accelerate growth and fast-track our product roadmap" toward that shift.

The read

Calling this a pre-Series C rather than a Series C is a choice worth reading: it is a bridge to improving fundamentals, likely priced ahead of a larger round once the GCC mix settles. The fundamentals support it — tripled revenue, a license-backed second market, and sovereign and development capital on the cap table. The competitive picture is harder, with regional and global processors moving on the same Gulf SME base Paymob now depends on for growth.

Source

Wamda — "Paymob raises $35 million pre-Series C co-led by Mubadala, EBRD"

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