Fintech platform Paymob secures $50 million in PayPal led Series B Funding
Egyptian fintech Paymob has announced that it has raised $50 million in Series B funding. Tround was led by PayPal Ventures, the global corporate venture arm of PayPal, along with New-York-based venture capital Kora Capital, and London-based Clay Point. New investors included Helios Digital Ventures, British International Investment (formerly the CDC Group) and Nclude, the venture fund launched by Global Ventures and three Egyptian banks.
The latest round brings Paymob’s total funding to over $68.5 million in capital, making it one of the big funding rounds in the MENA region.
CEO Islam Shawky told TechCrunch,“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 was launched in the Cairo-based fintech in 2015 by Shawky along with Alain El Hajj and Mostafa Menessy, with the aim to create an omnichannel payment infrastructure to accept payments via various methods, for example bank cards, mobile wallets, QR payments etc. Paymob also has a POS solution for offline merchants where they can receive in-store card payments.
Nitin Saigal, Founder, Kora Management, said, “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.”
The fintech startup plans to expand their operations in South Asia as well as consolidate the MENA region too. Focusing on MENA is something which attracted PayPal’s cheque book too, the investment being CVC firm’s second in Africa after South African open finance startup Stitch.
“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, Director, PayPal Ventures, in a statement.