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).