PayPalVentures, Clay Point And Kora Capital Lead Egypt’s Fintech Paymob’s $50 Million Series B Financing Round

Egypt’s fintech startup Paymob has raised $50 million in a Series B financing round co-led by London-based Clay Point, New York-based VC firm Kora Capital and PayPal Ventures – the global corporate venture arm of payments titan PayPal. The round saw the participation of other investors such as Nclude, Helios Digital Ventures, A15, FMO, Global Ventures, and British International Investment which was formerly known as the CDC Group.

The latest funding round comes more than a year after the startup raised $18.5 million in its Series A funding round which saw the participation of A15, FMO, and Global Ventures, who also participated in the new round.

Paymob’s Series B financing round brings its total funding to more than $68.5 million and is one of the largest Series B rounds ever recorded in Egypt and the MENA region.

For PayPal, its investment in Paymob is its first in the MENA region and its second in Africa after South Africa’s Stitch.

Paymob allows merchants to accept digital payments online and in-store thanks to its omnichannel payment infrastructure that includes mobile wallets, bank cards, QR payments, consumer finance payment option and even BNPL. It also offers a POS solution that offline merchants can use to receive in-store payments.

Paymob was founded in 2015 by CEO Islam Shawky with Alain El Hajj and Mostafa Menessy.  “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’s CEO explained.

Paymob counts more than a handful of international merchants as part of its clients. They include; LG, Virgin, Vodafone, Decathlon, Breadfast, etc. As of last year, the startup only had a little over 35,000 local and international merchants using its payment gateways. Now it has more than 100,000 of these merchants and wants to ramp up the number to at least a million in the next couple of years.

The startup can make such audacious plans as a result of a new product it launched in partnership with Mastercard. The product called Tap-on-phone is a contactless payment option that saves merchants the cost of obtaining POS machines, and other payment hardware, and solves a considerable number of challenges faced by merchants especially those that are SMEs. “For us, this is a game-changer for face-to-face transactions because this opens the market up for us and helps us grow tremendously,” Paymob’s CEO said.

Back in 2020, the startup reported a total payment volume of $5 billion. Recent financials shared by the company shows that its monthly volumes grew 4x YoY as of December 2021.

The startup claims to be operational in other markets such as Kenya and Palestine, even though it is yet to set up shop in these regions. The startup also has plans for expansion up its sleeves and plans to expand to Pakistan before the end of this year. According to a statement, this could see it grow faster and add up to 100,000 from the country in the next two years. It also plans to add a new checkout platform and launch cards to enable B2B transactions.

“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.

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,” Nitin Saigal, the founder of Kora Management said.