Dubai’s Ziina Raises $22 Million as UAE’s Small Business Sector Grows

Ziina has raised $22 million to provide FinTech services for UAE-based small businesses.

In an interview with TechCrunch Tuesday (Sept. 3), Co-founder and CEO Faisal Toukan said there were a few factors that made the company attractive to investors, including the rapidly-growing small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) segment in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the company’s newly-acquired central bank license.

Ziina originated as a peer-to-peer (P2P) payment app for splitting bills, such as for group trips or rent and still offers P2P services.

But the TechCrunch report notes that, while the company still offers P2P services, most of its product focus has shifted to SMEs, targeting an “underserved market” of 560,000 such businesses, which account for nearly 95% of all companies in the UAE.

“We’re an all-in-one platform for businesses to get paid in the UAE, having evolved from being purely a consumer app to an ecosystem that connects consumers and businesses for payments under one platform,” Toukan said.

“We look at the general experience as consumers can pay businesses, businesses can pay consumers, and then build that network effect across the two customer segments. And that is one of the key differentiators we have in our product strategy and business. So basically, everything should be under one ecosystem where people have a financially trusted partner.”

The funding comes weeks after another Dubai-based company, financial services firm Mamo, announced it had raised $4.3 million in new funding.

“Mamo’s mission is to empower people to manage and grow their money through simpler, faster and friendlier finance,” the company wrote on LinkedIn. “This newly raised capital will help expand the depth of Mamo’s SME-facing product offering within the UAE and support regional expansion.”

PYMNTS spoke with Mamo CEO Imad Gharazeddine in 2022 about the rise of P2P payments in the UAE and other countries in the Middle East/North Africa region.

“SMEs are tired of cash-on-delivery because of the operational hassles associated with it,” Gharazeddine told PYMNTS. “For example, if you deliver products or services and your customer comes to make a payment and they don’t have the right change, you have to send your driver back and forth a few times.”

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote earlier this year about the prevalence of “Click-and-Mortar shoppers,” in the UAE, a term for people who leverage both digital tools and physical locations to maximize their shopping experience.

“And, when surveyed about the quality of their digital shopping features, respondents shared what turned out to be the second highest level of customer satisfaction among the six countries we studied,” PYMNTS wrote. “This likely explains why 71% of UAE consumers used digital features to enhance their most recent shopping experience.”