Paymob raises $35m in Mubadala-EBRD round to target agentic commerce
Paymob, the Cairo-founded payments infrastructure platform now operating across Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman, has closed a $35 million pre-Series C round co-led by Abu Dhabi sovereign investor Mubadala Investment Company and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). British International Investment, Global Ventures and DPI Ventures also participated. The raise positions Paymob at the intersection of two of the most consequential capital stories in emerging markets finance: the Gulf's push to diversify its digital economy and the rise of agentic commerce as a structural demand driver for payments infrastructure.
The numbers behind the round are notable. Over the 18 months prior to the raise, Paymob's consolidated revenues grew threefold across its four markets, while GCC revenues expanded by a factor of seven, with the Gulf now contributing close to half of total group revenue. Since obtaining its Retail Payment Services Licence from the Central Bank of the UAE in January 2025, Paymob has onboarded approximately 20,000 merchants across its three GCC markets.
Fragmented markets, single-layer solution
The structural problem Paymob is solving is well understood by anyone who has tried to run a merchant business across MENA. The region's payments landscape is a patchwork of buy-now-pay-later providers, local card networks and bank instalment products, each requiring separate integrations, negotiations and settlement reconciliation. The company says a typical merchant operating across the region needs seven to eight payment methods to serve its customer base effectively. Paymob's answer is a single contract, a single API and a unified dashboard giving access to more than 60 payment methods, collapsing that complexity into one technology layer.
Islam Shawky, co-founder and CEO, framed the next phase in explicitly forward-looking terms: "This pre-Series C funding round will help us accelerate our growth plan across the MENA region and fast-track our product roadmap to become the go-to payments platform for agentic commerce." The reference to agentic commerce, in which autonomous AI agents execute purchases and manage supplier relationships on behalf of businesses without human intervention at each step, signals where Paymob believes its infrastructure must evolve. Payments rails built for human-initiated transactions will face architectural stress as AI-driven procurement scales; a platform that already abstracts away fragmentation is better positioned than single-market incumbents to serve that demand.
Sovereign capital and the GCC fintech build-out
The composition of Paymob's investor base tells its own convergence story. Mubadala's participation, through its MENA Venture Capital Fund, reflects Abu Dhabi's deliberate strategy of using sovereign capital to anchor digital-economy infrastructure that reinforces the emirate's position as a regional fintech hub. Ali Eid Al Mheiri, Executive Director of UAE Diversified Assets at Mubadala, cited financial inclusion and economic diversification as explicit investment rationales, language that places the raise squarely within the Gulf's post-oil capital reallocation agenda rather than a purely returns-driven VC thesis.
The EBRD's involvement adds a different dimension. Historically associated with transition economies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the bank has steadily expanded its mandate into the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean and, more recently, the broader MENA corridor. Its participation alongside Mubadala creates an unusual pairing of sovereign Gulf wealth and multilateral development finance, both betting on the same SME payments layer. For cross-sector investors watching where patient capital is flowing, this structure is increasingly common in markets where commercial VC alone cannot absorb the regulatory and infrastructure risk of early digital-finance build-outs.
The broader implication reaches beyond fintech. As agentic AI systems mature and begin to execute real commercial transactions autonomously, the quality of the underlying payments infrastructure in emerging markets becomes a binding constraint on AI adoption in those economies. A fragmented, multi-integration payments environment is not merely a merchant inconvenience; it is a bottleneck for the machine-to-machine commerce layer being built on top of it. Paymob's roadmap, and the capital now behind it, is effectively a bet that whoever owns the infrastructure layer in MENA owns the on-ramp to that future.