Paymob intends to use the $50 million raised from the funding round to expand operations and offerings across Africa and the Middle East.
Paymob, an Egyptian fintech platform, recently raised $50 million in a Series B funding round led by PayPal Ventures and Kora Capital. PayPal Ventures is the global corporate venture arm of the leading online payment processor PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL), while Kora Capital is a New York-based venture capital.
Furthermore, rounding out the lead investors from Paymob’s funding round is Clay Point, a London-based investment firm.
Speaking on the round, co-founder and CEO Islam Shawky expressed enthusiasm at the backing received from investors. As he put it:
“We are thrilled to complete this significant fundraising with the support of such renowned international investors including PayPal Ventures, the venture capital arm of a global pioneer in the digital payment space. It is a major endorsement of the strategy we have implemented to date and the scale of the opportunities we can harness.”
Furthermore, Paymob, which facilitates online and in-store digital payments for merchants, also received fresh capital from new and existing investors. New investors include Helios Digital Ventures, British International Investment (formerly the CDC Group), and Nclude, a venture fund established by Global Ventures and three Egyptian banks. Meanwhile, pre-existing investors included A15, FMO, and Global Ventures, who also invested in Paymob’s $18.5 million Series A last year.
More on Paymob Funding Round
The latest capital-generating round, one of the largest in Egypt and MENA, brings Paymob’s total funding to over $68.5 million. The Egyptian fintech says that it would channel the fresh funds towards expanding its product range. In addition, Paymob also stated that round proceeds would go towards enhancing its visibility in Africa and the Middle East. These include consolidating its position in the Egyptian market and establishing new markets across Africa and Middle Eastern regions.
Paymob is currently one of the most-funded platforms in its region, and Shawky intends to leverage this. Speaking on the Cairo-based fintech’s mode of operations, Shawky said:
“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.”
Paymob currently does business with different sizes of firms and merchants. The platform offers an omnichannel payment infrastructure that facilitates payments via numerous methods. These various methods include bank cards, mobile wallets, QR payments, and consumer finance payment options. In addition, Paymob also offers a POS solution to offline merchants where they can receive in-store card payments.
In 2021, Paymob had over 35,000 local and international merchants using its payment gateways. The list of merchants includes notable firms like Swvl, LG, Breadfast, and Homzmart. Furthermore, recent additions like Vodafone, LG, Virgin, Chalhoub Group, and Decathlon, have hiked that number to over 100,000 merchants. Shawky says that Paymob now has its sights set on hitting one million SMEs in the next few years.
Shawky, Alain El Hajj, and Mostafa Menessy founded Paymob in 2015. Since the company has immensely benefitted from explosive digital transformation across its region.
Tolu is a cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiast based in Lagos. He likes to demystify crypto stories to the bare basics so that anyone anywhere can understand without too much background knowledge.
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