Paymob, an Egyptian fintech that allows retailers to accept digital payments both online and in-store, said today that it has raised $50 million in Series B funding round.
PayPal Ventures, PayPal’s worldwide corporate venture arm, Kora Capital of New York, and Clay Point of London led the round.
Helios Digital Ventures, British International Investment (previously the CDC Group), and Nclude, the startup fund formed by Global Ventures and three Egyptian banks, are among the new investors. Existing investors from its $18.5 million Series A last April — A15, FMO, and Global Ventures increased their stake.
Ashish Aggarwal, the director at co-lead investor PayPal Ventures
The investment, one of the largest at this level in Egypt and the MENA region, takes Paymob’s total fundraising to more than $68.5 million.
Why The Investors Invested
The startup has generated considerable traction since it was last funded. Paymob had over 35,000 local and international retailers using their payment gateways last year, including Swvl, LG, Breadfast, and Homzmart. This merchant figure, which now includes Vodafone, LG, Virgin, Chalhoub Group, and Decathlon, has more than tripled to more than 100,000. CEO Islam Shawky claims that Paymob intends to reach a million SMEs in the coming years.
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Paymob also reported a total payment volume of $5 billion in 2020; the current value could not be determined. However, according to other metrics released by the corporation, monthly volumes increased 4x year on year as of December 2021. According to its website, Paymob had completed over 120 million transactions as of 2020.
“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.” Among its other plans for merchants include introducing a new checkout platform and the launch of cards to enable B2B transactions,” Nitin Saigal, the founder of Kora Management, said in a statement.
“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,” Ashish Aggarwal, the director at co-lead investor PayPal Ventures, said in a statement.
This is PayPal’s first investment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and the firm’s second in Africa following the South African open finance company Stitch. PayPal’s participation continues a trend from last year that saw global investors make their first batch of acquisitions, particularly in fintech, a sector that provided 60 percent of the overall VC funding.
A Look At What The Startup Does
Founded in 2015 by Islam Shawky, Alain El Hajj and Mostafa El Menessy, Paymob is an infrastructure technology enabler providing payment solutions to empower digital financial service providers across Africa and the Middle East through mobile wallet technology. The startup offers a variety of products and APIs that enable online and offline businesses to receive and send payments. The merchants can without difficulty integrate Paymob’s payment APIs into their websites or mobile applications to collect payments from their customers using first-rate fee strategies such as cards, mobile wallets, and cash on delivery.
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“Our mission is that we want to help the merchants grow,” said Shawky, who launched the Cairo-based fintech in 2015 with Alain El Hajj and Mostafa Menessy. “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 asserts that it serves merchants in additional areas, including Kenya and Palestine, but it has not yet established a presence in these regions. Instead, the company has set its sights on a handful of GCC and North African markets, for which this growth investment provides the necessary launch capital. Paymob will also chase a larger market share in Egypt and expand its product portfolio to include expense management software and the provision of working capital.
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The expansion to Pakistan could accelerate Paymob’s growth by the end of the year. According to a statement, the Egyptian fintech intends to add 100,000 merchants from the South Asian nation, which is home to over 4 million SMEs, within the next two years.
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Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexperts.com/view_expert/charles-rapulu-udoh