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Alaan, a Dubai-based fintech startup that has raised $2.5 million in a new investment round, announced that it will move away from stealth mode.
The multi-currency spend management platform said it will use the funds to increase its headcount and scale across multiple markets in the Middle East.
The new investment round was led by California-based investment fund Presight Capital and Berlin-based venture capital firms 468 Capital and Global Founders Capital.
Several angel investors also participated in the round. These include Mato Peric, Erik Podzuweit and Florian Prucker, founders of Scalable Capital, and Philippe Teixeira da Mota, founder of Hedosophia.
Alaan was founded last year to manage all company expenses through corporate cards and automated invoice payments.
“Our vision is to provide small and medium-sized enterprises with [small and medium enterprises] Parthi Duraisamy, CEO and Co-Founder of Alaan said:
“In markets such as the UAE, more than 80% of consumer payments are digital. But when it comes to business payments, we have not seen a substantial change, and the old world of offline payments still dominates. This is where Allen plays Where it works,” he said.
The Alaan platform provides employees with company cards to make company purchases and automatically reconcile expenses instantly.
It instantly issues virtual cards in global currencies, including UAE dirhams, Saudi Arabian riyals and US dollars, for e-commerce transactions, subscriptions, vendor payments and in-store purchases. The platform also intends to eliminate expense reporting and automate bookkeeping tasks by integrating with various accounting solution providers.
According to a report by data platform Magnitt, startups in the Middle East and North Africa region received a record amount of venture capital funding last year through 590 deals worth US$2.6 billion. About 35 new startups announced their exit in 2021, showing that the region’s startup landscape has matured.
“Every company in the region uses different payment instruments, and finance teams spend a lot of time handling manual tasks. Although more than 97% of business entities in the Middle East are SMEs, they are still largely underserved by traditional financial institutions. Not enough,” said Ludwig Ensthaler, general partner at 468 Capital.
“We were impressed [Alaan’s] Our vision is to help SMEs in the region digitize their payment processes with a superior platform that we believe will revolutionize spend management. “
Alaan has partnered with card issuers in several countries in the region to be able to issue corporate cards.
The company has developed the product in stealth mode over the past six months and has formed partnerships with regulated financial institutions to enable its launch, the company said, adding that it will announce the product soon. Product launch in the market.
“We founded Alaan after experiencing first-hand the frustrating expense and invoice management process. We solve a key pain point in the end-to-end payments process by building a software layer on top of regulated banking infrastructure.” said Karun Kurien, co-founder and head of product and technology at Alaan.
Update time: 4:30 am on March 2, 2022
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