Paymob, the Cairo-founded payments company, has raised $35 million in a pre-Series C round co-led by Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). The company said on 21 September 2026 that revenue from its Gulf markets has grown sevenfold over 18 months and now accounts for nearly half of the group total.
British International Investment, Global Ventures and DPI Ventures also took part. The round takes Paymob’s total disclosed funding past $125 million. No valuation was given.
Paymob sells payment acceptance to merchants across Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman: an online gateway, point-of-sale terminals and an app, offering more than 60 payment methods through a single integration. The company said it serves more than 390,000 merchants.
Egypt is now the smaller half
Consolidated revenue tripled over the same 18 months, the company said. Paymob has not published absolute revenue, but its two growth figures imply how far the mix has moved. If group revenue tripled while Gulf revenue grew sevenfold to reach roughly half the total, the Gulf was close to a fifth of revenue at the start of that period. Egypt, the only non-GCC market, has roughly doubled over the same window and gone from about four-fifths of the business to about half.
Islam Shawky, Paymob’s co-founder and chief executive, :
“Paymob morphed into a regional platform over the past 18 months, propelled by the exponential growth of our GCC business.”
The Gulf push rests on a UAE retail payment services licence from the Central Bank of the UAE, granted in January 2025. Paymob said it has added about 20,000 merchants across its three GCC markets since then.
When the company raised a led by the EBRD in September 2024, it served nearly 350,000 merchants. The net gain since is about 40,000, so the Gulf accounts for roughly half of the merchants added in two years, and a much larger share of the revenue growth.
Why Mubadala is in the round
Mubadala invested through its MENA venture capital fund. Ali Eid Al Mheiri, executive director of UAE diversified assets at Mubadala, said,
“Paymob’s UAE expansion aligns closely with our ambition under our MENA Venture Capital Fund, to support companies that strengthen the country’s digital economy and reinforce its position as a leading regional fintech hub.”
Bruno Lusic, a venture capital and growth investor at the EBRD, said:
“Paymob has built the payments infrastructure that MENA’s SME economy has been missing, a single, scalable layer that removes friction for merchants.”
The EBRD is now backing Paymob for a second time, after leading the 2024 extension.
Shawky told that the region has a gap in the region in growth, VC capital, and that international investors and sovereigns are filling it.
Agentic commerce on the roadmap
Paymob said the money will go towards expanding its acceptance business across MENA and building products for SME merchants and for agentic commerce, where AI agents initiate payments on a user’s behalf. Shawky said the round would help the company “fast-track our product roadmap to become the go-to payments platform for agentic commerce.” The company has not said what those products are or when they will ship.
Paymob reported its first profitable quarter in Egypt in the second quarter of 2024, at the time, but it has not said whether the group, or its Gulf business, is profitable now. It has disclosed growth multiples rather than revenue, and no valuation for a round that sits between its Series B and a Series C still to come.
