Paymob, the Egyptian fintech startup, has raised $50 million funding led by PayPal Ventures, Kora Capital, and Clay Point.
The round was joined by new investors including Helios Digital Ventures, British International Investment (formerly the CDC Group), Nclude, and three Egyptian banks. Existing investors from its $18.5 million Series A last April — A15, FMO, and Global Ventures strengthened their commitment.
The new funding takes Paymob’s total funding since inception to $68.5 million.
Founded in 2015 by Alain El Hajj, Islam Shawky and Mostafa Menessy , Paymob is a digital payments enabler for emerging markets helping small and large enterprises accept payments online and in-store.
The different payment options for businesses include bank cards, mobile wallets, QR payments, bank cards’ installments, BNPL, and consumer finance payment options. Paymob also has a POS solution for offline merchants where they can receive in-store card payments.
Commenting CEO Shawky says: “Our mission is that we want to help the merchants grow. So together we offer merchants, whether an SME or an international brand, the ability to accept all those payment methods and thus, increasing the probability and enhancing the probability for them to purchase and hopefully grow the revenue.”
Last year, Paymob had over 35,000 local and international merchants using its payment gateways like Swvl, LG, Breadfast, and Homzmart. This merchant number, which now includes the likes of Vodafone, LG, Virgin, Chalhoub Group, and Decathlon, has tripled to over 100,000.
“Paymob shares our mission and ambition of advancing digital payments adoption – it has made impressive strides in supporting the growth and success of underserved SMBs,” said Ashish Aggarwal, the director at co-lead investor PayPal Ventures, in a statement.
According to Nitin Saigal, the Kora Management founder, Paymob is “innovating at scale in the offline merchant acquiring and online payment gateway space as Egypt and the Middle East transition from being primarily cash-led to a digital heavy mode of transacting.”
