Egypt’s Paymob raises $22 million in Series B extension round

💸 Egypt-based fintech Paymob has raised $22 million in Series B extension, bringing its total Series B raise to $72 million.

• Founded in 2015 by Islam Shawky, Alain El Hajj, and Mostafa El Menessy, Paymob has now raised over $90M to scale its payment services.

💰 Investor lowdown: The $22M round was led by EBRD Venture Capital and Endeavor Catalyst, with participation from PayPal Ventures, BII, FMO, A15, Nclude, and Helios Digital Ventures.

📖 The back story

In 2015, three undergraduates from the American University in Cairo — Shawky, El Hajj, and Menessy — founded Paymob after struggling to integrate payment gateways with their e-commerce platform in a market where only 2% of households shopped online.

To solve this, they launched Paymob as a digital payment infrastructure, targeting the major gap in Egypt’s online payment methods.

Since then, Paymob has grown into a comprehensive payment platform, expanding beyond Egypt to serve merchants across the UAE and Saudi Arabia, while building partnerships with global brands like Shopify and Tabby.

⚙️ Breaking it down

Paymob offers over 50 payment methods, including wallets, cards, BNPL, and QR payments, empowering 350,000+ merchants across five MENA countries to accept both online and offline payments.

Since its initial Series B in 2022, Paymob has seen 6x revenue growth and became profitable in Egypt for the first time in Q2 2023.

While still unprofitable in other regions, the company’s UAE transaction volume reached Egypt's five-year milestone in just 14 months, highlighting its rapid expansion.

By offering additional services to merchants — like Shopify integration — Paymob has been able to increase revenue per merchant, and drive margin improvements.

🐂 Bull case

Paymob’s ability to cross-sell products, scale efficiently with 1,000 employees, and achieve profitability in its core market is impressive. Its expansion into the UAE and Saudi markets, where digital payments are growing, raises plenty of green flags for us.

🔮 Flashforward

Paymob will use the fresh funding injection to further expand across the GCC and enhance its product suite.