Foloosi, a UAE-born payments technology company, has received In-Principle Approval from the Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) for a Category III payments licence under the , the company said on 16 September 2026. The approval is a step towards a final licence, subject to Foloosi meeting the CBUAE’s remaining requirements and conditions.
Founded in 2018 by Omar Bin Brek and Mohan Karuppiah, Foloosi graduated from the that year and was incorporated as a DIFC company in September 2019 through FinTech Hive. The company built its business around helping UAE merchants accept and manage digital payments, expanding from an online payment gateway into a platform covering payment links, invoicing, subscriptions, QR payments, Tap to Phone and point-of-sale.
What the licence actually covers
A Category III licence under the Retail Payment Services and Card Schemes Regulation permits payment account issuance and merchant acquiring, but carries no cross-border payment scope, that sits under a different category, and requires AED 500,000 to AED 1 million in capital. The approval maps directly onto Foloosi’s existing UAE merchant-acquiring business rather than any international expansion.
Omar Bin Brek, Foloosi’s co-founder and chief executive, said,
“the approval reflects the progress we have made in building a strong, secure and scalable payments business in the UAE, the company began with a simple ambition: to build payment technology in the UAE that could serve businesses of every size.”
A funding history that looks thin next to the volume
Foloosi says it has processed more than AED 7 billion in payment volume and served more than 10,000 merchants across the UAE. Its disclosed funding history is comparatively small: a six-figure angel investment followed by a $500,000 seed round around 2019-2020 from two individual investors, Rashed Alfalasi and Mohammed Alsuwaidi. No larger institutional round has been publicly disclosed since.
The scale has grown substantially from where independent reporting last measured it. recorded Foloosi processing $7 million in transactions during 2020 alone, then serving more than 5,000 merchants, including Property Finder, Slash Coffee and Tutoring Club, on an app downloaded over 45,500 times. The two figures aren’t directly comparable, one an annual total from 2020, the other a cumulative figure Foloosi now cites, but the merchant base alone has roughly doubled since, without a matching increase in disclosed capital behind it.
An AI roadmap, not a live product
Alongside the licensing update, Foloosi outlined longer-term plans for what it calls ‘AI-native payment infrastructure’: transaction intelligence, real-time fraud and risk detection, intelligent payment routing, merchant analytics, automated reconciliation and, eventually, agentic payment infrastructure in which authorised AI agents interact directly with payment systems. The company frames this as a direction it is building towards rather than a feature already live, and did not give a timeline for any of it shipping.
