Technology
Paymob, Founded by Three College Friends, Earns Another $22 Million, Is Profitable in Egypt
Few ecosystems outside of Silicon Valley can boast successful tech startups founded by founders who were still in school or who recently dropped out of faculty, so when these events occur in regions just like the Middle East or Africa, it’s value listening to these firms.
A decade ago, Islam Shawky, Alaina El HajjAND Mostafa Menessythree students from the American University in Cairo, launched an e-commerce platform in Egypt. At the time, e-commerce was a booming industry, with only 2% of households in the country participating in it. One of the major reasons was the shortage of online payment methods.
“There was a gap between what banks were offering and the requirements of new business models from financial technology. No one was doing digital payments for e-commerce and digital startups,” Shawky said in Interview 2022.
Integrating the local banks’ payment gateway with the e-commerce platform was a pain, so Shawky and his friends launched Cry as a payment infrastructure for digital wallets in 2015 while still in college. What began as a small enterprise quickly grew into an omni-channel gateway offering over 50 payment methods, including wallets, cards, buy now, pay later (BNPL), and QR code payments, enabling over 350,000 merchants in five countries in the Middle East and North Africa to just accept online and offline payments.
To date, Paymob, which describes itself as a financial services enabler, has raised greater than $90 million to scale thus far, including a recently closed $22 million Series B round led by EBRD Venture Capital. This brings its total Series B funding to $72 million.
Cross-selling services for a growing seller base
When we last covered Paymob in 2022, the fintech was serving just over 100,000 local and international merchants, a number that had greater than tripled in two years after expanding from Egypt and Pakistan to Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Paymob’s initial $50 million Series B round in 2022, co-led by PayPal Ventures, which participated in the expansion round, spurred that expansion. During that point, the fintech also beefed up its product suite, CEO Shawky told TechCrunch. It launched an app for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and introduced payment methods like embedded checkout experiences and products like loans and advanced settlements.
“We help merchants accept, pay, manage and grow, those are the four divisions we have. Acceptance is the engine and the core business, and we sell everything around that,” Shawky explains. “Once merchants are onboarded, we help them accept digital transactions, and then step by step we help with payments, provide working capital and give them the tools to better manage their finances and their business.”
Paymob became profitable for the primary time in Egypt in the second quarter of this 12 months, where its revenue has increased six-fold since mid-2022. It stays unprofitable elsewhere.
Increasing the variety of merchants and increasing average revenue per merchant by cross-selling additional services has been a giant a part of the startup’s success. For example, if a Paymob customer only has a POS terminal that accepts cards, that only accounts for 10-15% of their business. By offering a collection of products through partnerships with Shopify and Tabby, Paymob’s margins have improved significantly. Doing this at scale, digitally, and without the necessity for an enormous sales force has likely fueled the startup’s effective growth (Paymob has just over 1,000 employees).
“What’s most gratifying for us is that we’ve been able to grow profitably, because over the last two years, a lot of people have said we have to stop growing to be profitable or to preserve our runway,” Shawky noted. “But we’ve shown that if you build a fundamentally sound business and you really address customer needs, you can scale quickly and still be profitable.”
Rapid adoption of online payments in the UAE
Indeed, in Egypt and the Gulf countries there’s a dynamic growth in the recognition of digital payments.
In Egypt, 88% of consumers have used not less than one recent payment method in the past 12 months, and 85% of SMEs recognize that accepting multi-channel digital payments is vital to their growth, in response to Mastercard. Meanwhile, in the United Arab Emirates, demand for digital payment methods is more pronounced, with around 77% adoption nationwide.
Based on conversations with founders, it’s clear that despite such strong demand, the market stays underserved. As such, fintech firms which have expanded into the UAE, reminiscent of Paymob and native players like Ziina, which we wrote about last week, are racing to fill the gap by offering tailored solutions to half 1,000,000 merchants, capitalizing on the country’s growing appetite for digital payments.
As an illustration of this explosion in demand, Paymob only offers a web based payment acceptance product in the UAE, yet in just 14 months, its transaction volume in the UAE has grown to the dimensions of Egypt’s entire business, which took five years to construct. Reasons for this rapid growth in the Middle Eastern country include higher purchasing power, currency strength, and a greater share of digital wallets versus money.
Nevertheless, Egypt stays its largest market. Shawky is confident that a collection of fintech products geared toward promoting a cashless society, combined with efforts by the federal government and the central bank, will help Egypt achieve the identical level of digital payments adoption seen in the UAE.
“Issuance and acceptance need to go hand in hand for Egypt’s economy to reach this turning point. The central bank is putting a lot of effort and investment into the country’s digital infrastructure,” the CEO noted. “We are seeing the results. Our business has grown six-fold in two years and four months; yes, we have increased our merchant base, but it is also because these merchants are processing more digital volumes.”
Paymob reported $5 billion in total payments in 2020 and facilitated greater than 120 million transactions that 12 months. However, the present numbers for each metrics remain unclear because the fintech has not disclosed updated numbers.
In addition to PayPal Ventures, the fintech’s Series B funding round included Endeavor Catalyst, in addition to existing investors: British International Investment (BII), FMO, A15, Nclude, and Helios Digital Ventures (HDV).
Technology
Department of Justice: Google must sell Chrome to end its monopoly
The U.S. Department of Justice argued Wednesday that Google should sell its Chrome browser as part of a countermeasure to break the corporate’s illegal monopoly on online search, according to a filing with the Justice Department. United States District Court for the District of Columbia. If the answer proposed by the Department of Justice is approved, Google won’t have the option to re-enter the search marketplace for five years.
Ultimately, it’ll be District Court Judge Amit Mehta who will determine what the ultimate punishment for Google might be. This decision could fundamentally change one of the most important firms on the planet and alter the structure of the Internet as we understand it. This phase of the method is anticipated to begin sometime in 2025.
In August, Judge Mehta ruled that Google constituted an illegal monopoly since it abused its power within the search industry. The judge also questioned Google’s control over various web gateways and the corporate’s payments to third parties to maintain its status because the default search engine.
The Department of Justice’s latest filing says Google’s ownership of Android and Chrome, that are key distribution channels for its search business, poses a “significant challenge” to remediation to ensure a competitive search market.
The Justice Department has proposed other remedies to address the search engine giant’s monopoly, including Google spinning off its Android mobile operating system. The filing indicated that Google and other partners may oppose the spin-off and suggested stringent countermeasures, including ending the use of Android to the detriment of search engine competitors. The Department of Justice has suggested that if Google doesn’t impose restrictions on Android, it must be forced to sell it.
Prosecutors also argued that the corporate must be barred from stepping into exclusionary third-party agreements with browser or phone firms, resembling Google’s agreement with Apple to be the default search engine on all Apple products.
The Justice Department also argued that Google should license its search data, together with ad click data, to competitors.
Additionally, the Department of Justice also set conditions prohibiting Google from re-entering the browser market five years after the spin-off of Chrome. Additionally, it also proposed that after the sale of Chrome, Google mustn’t acquire or own any competing ad text search engine, query-based AI product, or ad technology. Moreover, the document identifies provisions that allow publishers to opt out of Google using their data to train artificial intelligence models.
If the court accepts these measures, Google will face a serious setback as a competitor to OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic in AI technology.
Google’s answer
In response, Google said the Department of Justice’s latest filing constitutes a “radical interventionist program” that may harm U.S. residents and the country’s technological prowess on the planet.
“The Department of Justice’s wildly overblown proposal goes far beyond the Court’s decision. “It would destroy the entire range of Google products – even beyond search – that people love and find useful in their everyday lives,” said Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer Kent Walker. blog post.
Walker made additional arguments that the proposal would threaten user security and privacy, degrade the standard of the Chrome and Android browsers, and harm services resembling Mozilla Firefox, which depends upon Google’s search engine.
He added that if the proposal is adopted, it could make it tougher for people to access Google search. Moreover, it could hurt the corporate’s prospects within the AI race.
“The Justice Department’s approach would lead to unprecedented government overreach that would harm American consumers, developers and small businesses and threaten America’s global economic and technological leadership at precisely the moment when it is needed most,” he said.
The company is to submit a response to the above request next month.
Wednesday’s filing confirms earlier reports that prosecutors were considering getting Google to spin off Chrome, which controls about 61% of the U.S. browser market. According to to the StatCounter web traffic service.
Technology
Snowflake acquires data management company Datavolo
Cloud giant Snowflake has agreed to take over Datavoloa company managing the data pipeline, for an undisclosed amount.
Snowflake announced the deal on Wednesday after the market bell closed, while reporting its third-quarter 2025 earnings. The purchase has not yet closed and is subject to customary closing conditions, Snowflake noted wa release.
Joseph Witt and Luke Roquet, who met while working together at Hortonworks, founded Datavolo in 2023. Witt was previously a vp at Cloudera, and Roquet was Cloudera’s chief marketing officer and, before that, director of business development at AWS.
Datavolo uses Apache NiFi, an open source data processing project developed by the NSA, to power a platform to automate data flow between disparate enterprise data sources. Data “processors” extract, cleanse, transform and enrich data, including for generative use of artificial intelligence.
With Datavolo having raised $21 million in enterprise capital from investors including Citi Ventures and General Catalyst prior to the acquisition, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy envisions creating more comprehensive data pipelines for Snowflake customers. For example, he says Datavolo can enable users to interchange single-use data connectors with flexible pipelines that allow them to maneuver data from cloud and on-premises sources to Snowflake’s data cloud.
“By bringing Datavolo to Snowflake, we are increasing the amount of data captured by Snowflake over the lifecycle, providing our customers with both simplicity and cost savings, without sacrificing data extensibility,” Ramaswamy said in a press release. “We are thrilled to have the Datavolo team join Snowflake as we accelerate the best platform for enterprise data – unstructured and structured, batch and streaming – and committed to the success of the open source community.”
Witt says Snowflake will support and help manage the Apache NiFi project after the acquisition closes. “Data engineering at scale can be extremely expensive and complex, and our goal has always been to simplify our customers’ experiences so they can realize value faster,” he added within the press release. “By joining forces with Snowflake, we can deliver the massive scale and radical simplicity of the Snowflake platform to our customers, ultimately unlocking data engineering for more users.”
Thanks partly to artificial intelligence, demand for data management technologies has increased. Fortune’s business insights estimates that the worldwide enterprise data management market could possibly be price $224.87 billion by 2032.
However, data management has been a challenge for enterprises long before the substitute intelligence boom. According to in a 2022 survey by Great Hopetions, a data quality platform, 91% of organizations said data quality issues impact their performance.
Against this backdrop, it isn’t surprising that firms like Datavolo are gaining prominence.
Today was a giant day for Snowflake who reported better-than-expected earnings sent the company’s shares up 19%. In addition to the acquisition of Snowflake, the company announced a multi-year partnership with Anthropic to integrate the startup’s AI models into Snowflake’s Cortex AI, Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Analyst products.
Technology
Federal prosecutors have charged another Forbes 30 Under 30 alum with fraud
FBI yesterday he unveiled the indictment which accused Joanna Smith-Griffin, founding father of the bogus intelligence startup AllHere Education, of engaging in “securities fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in connection with defrauding investors” of nearly $10 million. The FBI alleges that from a minimum of November 2020 through June 2024, she misrepresented her company’s revenue, customer base and money to investors.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the corporate is in Chapter 7 bankruptcy. If convicted, Smith-Griffin faces prison sentences that include a maximum sentence of 20 years for securities fraud, a maximum sentence of 20 years for wire fraud, and a compulsory sentence two years for a professional identity thief. Smith-Griffin couldn’t be reached for comment.
The Forbes 30 Under 30 list has change into a meme over the past few years as several winners have been accused of fraud. The The Forbes-for-scam pipeline includes FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, co-CEO of (*30*) Research; Fintech founder Frank, Charlie Javice, and “Pharma bro” Martin Shkreli.
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