MENA’s Amwal Tech raises $2.5M Pre-SEED 

FinTech Amwal has secured $2.5M in a Pre-SEED round co-led by Shorooq Partners and Outliers Venture Capital with angel investors. Amwal aims to improve the way money gets authenticated worldwide. By abstracting device identity, fraud prevention, and payment tokenization in a single API, Amwal has built a cryptographic biometric checkout solution.  

FinTech continues to reign at the top in the MENA region. In 2022, the sector reported a rise in both deals and funding accumulating over $900M across 130+ deals, as seen in our FY2022 MENA FinTech Venture Investment Report. The sector alone was responsible for bringing in almost 30% of the total capital deployed in the MENA region. The country breakdown showed that UAE remained the country of focus capturing 37% of total FinTech funding and 34% of the deals in MENA. KSA, on the other hand, came in second with a $100M round closed by Tamara. The smaller ecosystems also joined the top geographies of MENA mainly driven by MEGA rounds closed by a single startup. Bahrain-based Rain raised $110M in its Series B round in 2022. 

According to the startup, every day in the MENA, there are more than 50 Mn online transactions (e-commerce, bank-bank transfer, wallet, or remittance). The current way to authenticate them is a mix of outmoded credential-based (passwords) and (sms OTPs). These factors are frictional, phishable, and costly to maintain and distribute. “It is one of the first implementations of multi-device authentication tokens (FIDO-passkeys) for payments. By removing the friction of account creation, shipping address, payment details, and authentication, Amwal is enabling its network of merchants to increase their checkout conversion by 35%,” shared co-founder and CEO Mohamed Zaghoo. 

Amwal says it is looking to improve the authentication and authorization for the MENA $250Bn payment market. Amwal biometric checkout is licensed from Saudi payments (Saudi Central Bank). “We are extremely proud to join Amwal’s journey in revolutionizing the authentication and processing infrastructure for payments in the region and beyond. As part of Shorooq Partners' fintech infrastructure thesis, we strongly share the founders’ belief that the future of online payments is identity-powered, and by building on Amwal’s novel technology, we can establish new rails of secure and seamless flow of funds that will propel trade on a global scale,” concluded Mahmoud Adi, founding partner of Shorooq Partners.