Pemo has received in-principle approval for a Stored Value Facilities (SVF) licence from the Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE), the company announced. Pemo said it expects to complete the full licensing process in the coming months. Ayham Gorani is the company’s co-founder and chief executive.
Pemo is a Dubai-based spend management platform for small and medium-sized businesses, offering corporate virtual and physical cards alongside automated expense tools. The company said the approval would let it expand its financial services offering beyond its current card-issuing and expense-management product.
What the licence would allow
An SVF licence, once final, would let Pemo hold and manage customer business funds digitally rather than routing every transaction through a partner bank, introduce its own digital wallets, and give customers faster access to funds.
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| Regulator | Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) |
| Regulation | Stored Value Facilities Regulation, issued via Circular No. 6/2020 in November 2020 |
| Minimum paid-up capital | AED15 million, or an equivalent amount in another CBUAE-approved currency |
| Additional capital requirement | Aggregate capital funds equal to at least 5% of total customer float held |
| Other requirement | An unconditional, irrevocable bank guarantee for the full paid-up capital amount, payable to the CBUAE on first demand |
| What it covers | E-wallets, prepaid cards, digital payment applications and other platforms that digitally store customer value |
Growth since its last funding round
Pemo has raised two disclosed rounds: a $12 million seed round in May 2022, co-led by Cherry Ventures and Shorooq Partners, and a $7 million pre-Series A round in November 2024, co-led by Augmentum Fintech and Shorooq. At the time of the pre-Series A round, Pemo said it had reached AED1.4 billion in annualised transactions and was used by more than 4,000 companies.
In its SVF announcement, Pemo said it now serves more than 6,000 UAE business customers, an increase of roughly 2,000 since the pre-Series A figures were disclosed less than two years earlier. The company has not disclosed an updated transaction volume figure alongside the SVF news.
Pemo is also one of four fintechs, alongside Mamo, Qashio and Vault, named in a Dubai Chambers memorandum of understanding aimed at broadening SME access to digital banking services across payments, spend management, savings and working capital financing, according to the of that initiative.
Pemo’s own announcement cited figures on the financing gap it says it addresses: small and medium-sized businesses make up roughly 90% of the UAE’s operating companies and drive more than 60% of non-oil GDP, but receive only around 10% of total bank funding, according to the company. Those figures come from Pemo’s own release rather than an independent audit.
Separately, broader UAE SME research has found that roughly a third of surveyed SMEs could not obtain short-term financing when they needed it. That is a financing gap that predates and extends beyond corporate card and spend-management products specifically.
