Egypt’s Paymob Raises $50m in April

Egyptian fintech firm Paymob, which enables merchants to receive digital payments online and in-store, announced on Monday it has raised $50 million in Series B funding.

The new round is led by PayPal Ventures, the global corporate venture arm of PayPal, New-York-based venture capital Kora Capital, and London-based Clay Point.

This is PayPal’s first investment in the Middle East region and seems to be the CVC firm’s second in Africa after South African open finance startup Stitch.

The venture fund launched by Global Ventures and three Egyptian banks.

For the Series B funding, new participating investors include Helios Digital Ventures, British International Investment (formerly the CDC Group) and Nclude. Meanwhile, existing investors from Paymob’s $18.5 million Series A last April — A15, FMO, and Global Ventures — doubled down.

This new round is one of the largest at this stage in Egypt and the Middle East, bringing Paymob’s total funding to over $68.5 million.

“Our mission is that we want to help the merchants grow,” said CEO Islam 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.” Shawky explained.

Paymob deals with businesses and merchants of all sizes. Its multichannel payment infrastructure allows them to receive payments via various methods. These various options include bank cards, mobile wallets, QR payments, bank cards’ installments, BNPL and consumer finance paying options. For offline merchants, Paymob has a POS solution, where they can get in-store card payments.

In 2021, Paymob had more than 35,000 local and international merchants using its payment gateways, including big names 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 more than 100,000. Shawky said Paymob seeks to reach a million SMEs in the next couple of years.