Cairo-born fintech MoneyHash has raised $4.5 million in a seed round led by Dubai’s COTU Ventures and Saudi’s Sukna Ventures, it announced in a statement today.
The round was also joined by Riyadh-based RZM Investment, Dubai Future District Fund, Athens-based VentureFriends, GitHub’s co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, and a few other ‘strategic investors’ and operators. It takes total capital raised to date by MoneyHash to $7.5 million.
Founded in 2020 by Nader Abdelrazik and Mustafa Eid, MoneyHash offers an ‘end-to-end payment operating system’ to businesses in the Middle East & Africa.
Its suite of products is comprised of a unified API that integrates pay-in and pay-out rails, a customizable checkout experience, transaction routing capabilities that come with fraud and failure rate optimizers, and a transaction reporting dashboard.
The platform helps merchants improve increase their payments success rate, reduce costs and fraud, eliminate failure, and automate different payment operations.
As the startup notes in its statement, the payments landscape is highlight fragmented in the Middle East & Africa, with each country having multiple payment providers and methods and different regulations.
MoneyHash is trying to fix that with its platform, which comes with over 200 pre-integrated APIs with payment service providers, like Stripe, Adyen, Checkout.com, and Fawry, and payment methods like card, cash, wallets, BNPL, bank accounts, or crypto, across 80+ markets.
The startup promises a 10 to 20 percent increase in revenue for merchants using its product and up to 90 reduction in development cost.
According to its website, MoneyHash is priced at $500 per month plus 0.4 percent per transaction.
The startup launched its beta in 2022 with startups like Foodics, Rain, and Tamatem using its products. MoneyHash then launch its enterprise suite less than six months ago for large enterprises.
The fintech tripled its revenue and grew its volume by 30 times in 2023, it said in a statement.
Nader Abdelrazik, co-founder and CEO of MoneyHash, said, “In MEA, payment failure rates are three times the global average, and fraud rates and cart abandonment are over 20% higher than in all other regions. This places merchants in a challenging position, viewing payments as a cost and risk center rather than a strategic enabler.”
“However, the opportunity is enormous. MEA’s trillions of dollars in payments are still less than 10% digital, suggesting the region will experience the most growth over the next decade. Merchants who navigate the complex payment ecosystem effectively will reap significant benefits. This is where MoneyHash steps in,” he added.
Amir Farha, Managing Partner at COTU Ventures, said, “We firmly believe that the full potential of digital payments in MEA is yet to be realized. MoneyHash developed a sophisticated and high-quality platform that can catalyze the growth of digital payments across the region, enabling both global and local merchants to tap into new revenue streams.”
Asher Siddiqui, General Partner at Sukna Ventures, said that the team at MoneyHash has skilled payment operators “who have leveraged their expertise to establish a competitive edge, prioritizing engineering precision above all else. Their product, refined with precision and supported by a stellar team, is exceptionally well-positioned to lead the market and define the future of digital payments in the region.”
The startup plans to use the latest funds to expand its team and fuel its growth.
