Ziina, a fintech company based in the UAE, has seen its growth explode to $22M.
After expanding its offerings to meet the needs of micro, small, and medium-sized businesses in the UAE, three years later, Dubai-based startup Ziina has received $22 million from Altos Ventures as Series A funding.
Three years later, the Dubai-based startup, which now counts 50,000 retail and business customers byafter expanding its offerings to meet the needs of micro, small, and medium-sized businesses in the UAE, has netted $22 million in Series A funding led by Altos Ventures.
Indeed, such sizable follow-on funding despite the global funding slowdown underscores investors’ confidence in the fintech company’s growth — the company claims 34% month-over-month growth in customers for the last year, and says its revenues have increased ten-fold over the same period. Faisal Tukan, co-founder and CEO of Ziina, told TechCrunch three things made the company so attractive to investors. They include the rapidly expanding SME segment in the UAE, its focus on product-led growth, and its recently acquired central bank license.
Expanding SME segment
Ziina originated as a peer-to-peer (P2P) payment app for splitting bills, such as for group trips or rent. Toukan says that while the app was popular with UAE retail customers, many business owners wanted to use it to receive and send payments. First, the business feature enabled users to share payment links, and receive payments through Apple Pay and Google Pay. MasterCard and Visa were also available. As the demand for Ziina’s products from businesses grew, Ziina created more for them. These included a payment gateway integrated with platforms such as WooCommerce and Shopify to accept online payments; point-of sale (POS) systems for making payments in person using QR codes; and social media payments. In addition to these features, Ziina added CRM functions so businesses can track customer details and interactions.
The YC-backed startup continues to offer its P2P service, but it’s clear why most of its product focus is now on small businesses. The startup targets a market that is underserved, with 560,000 SMEs. These companies account for 94% of the UAE’s total businesses and 60% of its GDP. Around 77% of SMEs had already adopted digital payments by 2023 in the UAE. This has fueled the demand for financial management software. We look at how consumers pay businesses and businesses pay consumers. Then we build a network effect between the two segments. This is a key differentiation in our business and product strategy. So basically, everything should be under one ecosystem where people have a financially trusted partner.”
Product-led growth
From a product standpoint, Ziina says it addresses three critical pain points for SMEs in the payments space: accessibility, cost transparency, and user experience.
Regarding accessibility, SMEs can use the fintech to open accounts and set up a payment processor in minutes instead of weeks.
In terms of cost, Ziina says it offers straightforward pricing with no hidden fees — 2.6% plus 1 AED (about US$ 0.25) for each payment link and POS transaction, and 2.9% plus 1 AED for each payment gateway transaction.
Lastly, customers have a dashboard to track and reconcile online and offline payments and payment links. Ziina has grown rapidly over the past year and now serves 50,000 users. This includes both retail and corporate customers. Toukan tells TechCrunch the startup is now processing about 1,050 dirhams every 60 seconds, and on track to handle around 1.1 billion dirhams in annualized transactions volume. This is up from 550 millions dirhams last year ($150million). According to the chief executive, 55% of its customers have come organically, while the rest have come from B2B referrals.
However, as it continues to scale and provide more financial services off the back of the banking license it received, that’ll likely change. Revolut is among the first to hire salespeople for the company. Ziina is the first venture-backed company to receive a stored value facility license (SVF) from the Central Bank of the UAE. The fintech can now offer more financial services, excluding lending (which requires a separate licence) and generate revenue through the float, when customers store assets on the platform. Toukan believes this license, and the financial ecosystem that Ziina offers (the fintech will soon launch its card product ZiiCard), gives Ziina a competitive edge over other fintechs in the region that offer overlapping services. Paymob, for instance, provides POS terminals; Tabby is growing its financial offerings outside of buy now, pay later; Telda offers P2P payments; and Mamo is in the spend management business.
Despite this competition, the chief executive, who founded the fintech with Sarah Toukan and Andrew Gold, sees ample market potential for Ziina in the rapidly growing payments sector for consumers and businesses across the MENA region.
“The Middle East seems to be growing quite strongly, especially regarding GDP growth. The CEO noted that the UAE was a pioneer in this area. Ziina, if we do our job correctly (which we are quite excited about), we should be able, four years from now to have 200,000 businesses active on the platform, due to the growth of SMEs in UAE. If you look at Nubank in Brazil they have achieved their targets of 10-20% market penetration. We intend to be Nubank for the region. Ziina has now raised over $30 million in total since its founding in 2020.
