Paymob’s $35m Pre-Series C follows a GCC revenue jump

Pre-Series C is how Paymob is paying for a Gulf company that still files as Egyptian. The Cairo-founded payments firm said on 21 September 2026 that it had closed 35 million dollars co-led by Mubadala Investment Company and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. British International Investment, Global Ventures and DPI Ventures joined. Disclosed equity now sits a little above 125 million dollars. Valuation was not published. That is the punch. Paymob’s growth story is no longer Egypt-first. Consolidated revenue across four markets tripled in 18 months, the company says. GCC revenue rose sevenfold and now accounts for nearly half of the group. After a Retail Payment Services Licence from the Central Bank of the UAE in January 2025, it added about 20,000 merchants in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman. Islam Shawky, co-founder and chief executive, called the last year and a half a morph into a regional platform. He wants the new money to make Paymob the payments layer for agentic commerce, where software agents check out on a user’s behalf. The product is still merchant acceptance. More than 390,000 businesses sit on gateway, POS, SoftPOS and payment links, with 60-plus methods in one integration. Founders are Shawky, Alain El Hajj and Mostafa Menessy, from 2015. Licences now cover Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman and, in some tallies, Pakistan. Use of proceeds is core acceptance, SME tools including working capital, and the agentic stack. Shawky has also said the region is short of growth-stage capital and that sovereigns and DFIs are filling that gap. Mubadala’s first cheque on this cap table is the political fact. EBRD is a repeat, after leading the 22 million dollar Series B extension in September 2024. Older money is a long list. Series A opened at 3.5 million dollars in 2020 and closed at 18.5 million in 2021. Series B was 50 million dollars in 2022, then the 2024 extension, 72 million dollars in that series alone. Prior names include PayPal Ventures, Kora Capital, Clay Point, FMO, A15 and Helios Digital Ventures. Mubadala is investing through its MENA Venture Capital Fund on the UAE Investments Platform. That is an Abu Dhabi bet on a Cairo rail that now books in dirhams and riyals. The MENA angle is the mix of passport and revenue. Egyptian fintechs that stay Egyptian struggle to price a C round. Paymob priced a pre-C by becoming half Gulf. That is the opposite of a landing-page expansion. It is a licence in Abu Dhabi, an office in Riyadh, and a sovereign on the register. If agentic commerce is more than a slide, the 35 million dollars buys rails for machines that pay. If GCC growth stalls at 20,000 merchants, it bought time before a full Series C. Caveats belong next to the sevenfold line. Those growth rates are company-reported, not audited in the release. Merchant count is not take-rate. Agentic commerce is a category still being invented. Valuation silence means you cannot mark this against the 2022 B. DFIs and sovereigns like inclusion language. They also like regulated volume. If Paymob turns half of GCC revenue into a durable mix and ships an agent checkout that merchants actually switch on, the Pre-Series C did its job. If the next raise needs another adjective before C, the Gulf share was a good quarter, not a new company. Count licensed volume, not the co-lead photo.