Everything announced at Money20/20 Middle East 2026

Money20/20 Middle East took place in Riyadh in 2026, and the week produced one of the densest stretches of fintech news Saudi Arabia has seen in a single window — funding rounds, new payment acceptance capabilities, a startup competition, and a stream of partnership and product announcements. This is TechScoop's comprehensive rundown of what was announced, organised by category rather than by chronology, drawing on Money20/20's own press releases and reporting from SaudiOnline . Many companies timed announcements around the event this year: rather than a single blockbuster headline, the show produced a wide spread of announcements across funding, payments infrastructure, SME finance and an active startup competition, several of which TechScoop has covered as standalone stories elsewhere. This roundup exists to pull all of it into one place, organised the way a reader trying to catch up on the whole week would actually want to read it — by category, rather than by the order the announcements landed in. Funding: the week's biggest cheques Funding news dominated the run-up to and duration of the conference. Tabby announced a $233 million Series F led by Blue Pool Capital, valuing the profitable BNPL and shopping app at $6.5 billion on the back of $18 billion in annualised transaction volume and 25 million users. barq raised $329.5 million in one of the largest Series A rounds the Saudi market has produced. Tarabut secured $50 million in strategic financing from Riyad Bank, GIB Saudi, X-Tech Fund, and the Zamil and Kanoo groups. On the lending side, Lendo and Quantic launched a $200 million SME financing programme , and Rize secured a $50 million facility from Jadwa Investment. Rounding out the funding news, Abwab.ai raised a $4 million seed round led by Speedinvest, with MEVP participating. A fuller breakdown of what those six deals add up to is in TechScoop's numbers-led look at Saudi fintech's very big September . What stands out across the six rounds is how differently sized and differently structured they are. Tabby and barq represent the largest cheques of the week, with Tabby's backed by $18 billion in annualised transaction volume. Tarabut's round brought in strategic bank and family-business capital rather than a conventional venture syndicate. Lendo-Quantic and Rize-Jadwa were both structured as debt or asset-backed facilities rather than equity, aimed specifically at funding the loan books those platforms originate rather than their operating costs. And Abwab.ai's seed round, though the smallest by dollar amount, came with the kind of processing-volume evidence — more than SR10 billion in loans run through its infrastructure — that is more typical of a later-stage company than a seed-stage one. Read side by side, the six deals describe a fintech sector that is being funded across every stage and every layer of the stack simultaneously, rather than concentrated in one category or maturity level. Payments: new acceptance rails land in Saudi Arabia Two payment acceptance announcements stood out among the show's product news. Alipay+ payment acceptance is coming to Saudi Arabia , extending the cross-border wallet network's reach into the kingdom and giving merchants a route to accept payments from international travellers who use Alipay+-linked wallets. Separately, Apple's Tap to Pay on iPhone is coming to Saudi Arabia , letting merchants accept contactless card and digital wallet payments directly on an iPhone without needing a separate card reader. Both announcements point toward the same broader story TechScoop unpacks in how Saudi Arabia is quietly building one of the region's most connected payment ecosystems — a market stitching together mada, Apple Pay, Tap to Pay and now Alipay+ into an increasingly interoperable payments layer. The two announcements are aimed at slightly different problems even though both fall under the umbrella of "payment acceptance." Alipay+ acceptance is primarily an inbound-tourism and cross-border play: it lets Saudi merchants accept payment from travellers whose primary wallets are linked to Alipay+'s network, without those travellers needing a Saudi bank account or card. Tap to Pay on iPhone is a domestic merchant-acquiring play: it lowers the cost and friction of accepting contactless payments for merchants, particularly smaller ones, by turning a phone they may already own into a payment terminal rather than requiring a dedicated card reader. Both reduce friction on the acceptance side of a transaction rather than the consumer side, which is consistent with a broader pattern in Saudi payments this year of infrastructure providers competing on how easy they can make it for a merchant to get paid, in addition to how easy they make it for a consumer to pay. MoneySurge: the startup competition Money20/20's Riyadh edition ran its MoneySurge startup competition alongside the main conference. Three companies took home the top prizes: Tanami won the $200,000 Best in Show awar