Mubadala Backs Paymob’s $35 Million Round as Gulf Payments Revenue Rises

Mubadala announced its participation in Paymob's $35 million pre-Series C round, giving the Abu Dhabi sovereign investor a position in a MENA payments company that is using the funding to expand its regional merchant platform.

The investment is aimed at two linked parts of Paymob's next phase: widening its core digital payments acceptance business across the Middle East and North Africa, and building products for small and medium-sized merchants as commerce starts to include more automated, agent-driven purchasing flows.

Mubadala’s announcement describes faster growth for Paymob in the Gulf than in its wider business.

Over the past 18 months, the company's consolidated revenue across four markets rose threefold, while GCC revenue increased sevenfold.

Gulf markets now generate close to half of total revenue, making the region central to the company's expansion case rather than an adjacent market.

The UAE license has also turned into a merchant-acquisition channel.

Since Paymob secured its Retail Payment Services Licence from the Central Bank of the UAE in January 2025, it has added roughly 20,000 merchants across its three GCC markets.

The company entered the UAE in 2023, opened a Riyadh office the same year, obtained a Payment Technical Service Provider license from Saudi Payments and later opened in Oman.

Paymob's pitch to merchants centers on simplifying a payments market split across buy-now-pay-later providers, domestic card schemes and bank instalment products.

A merchant operating across the region may need seven or eight payment methods, each carrying separate integration, negotiation and reconciliation work.

Paymob offers one contract, one API and a single dashboard that connects businesses to more than 60 payment methods.

That infrastructure is now supporting a larger merchant base.

Paymob says its omnichannel gateway serves more than 390,000 merchants, allowing businesses to accept online and offline payments, manage transactions and handle financial operations from one technology layer.

The new Mubadala backing adds a sovereign investor to a cap table that spans strategic payments capital, development-finance institutions and regional venture funds.

The named backers include PayPal Ventures, FMO, British International Investment, DPI Ventures, Kora Capital, A15, Global Ventures, Clay Point Capital and Helios Digital Ventures.

Islam Shawky, Paymob's co-founder and chief executive, framed the round around accelerated MENA growth and a faster product roadmap for agentic commerce.

For Mubadala, the deal fits its MENA Venture Capital Fund's focus on companies that can strengthen the UAE's digital economy and scale across the GCC.

Ali Eid Al Mheiri, executive director for UAE Diversified Assets at Mubadala's UAE Investments Platform, linked the investment to merchant support, financial inclusion and economic diversification.

The transaction leaves Paymob with a clearer Gulf growth mandate: expand merchant volume through its UAE and Saudi licenses and its presence in Oman while using the pre-Series C capital to broaden payments acceptance and product development across MENA.