After a new round of financing, Tabby, a Dubai based FinTech company has increased its debt facility more than two-fold to $350 million. The funding was led by global credit investors including US-based Atalaya Capital Management, Partners for Growth and CoVenture. The Mubadala-backed startup said in a statement that this evinced the “remarkable growth it was experiencing, with more than 4 million active customers.”
Operating under the ‘buy now pay later’ (BNPL) business model, Tabby’s platform went live in February 2020 and has since signed agreements with over 15,000 global brands and small businesses like H&M, Adidas, IKEA and Bloomingdale’s.
In January, the startup raised $660 million in Series C funding from PayPal, Sequoia Capital India and STV from Saudi Arabia. It also received another line of debt financing in August 2022 for $150 million from Atalaya Capital and PFG. All this has contributed to Tabby becoming one of the most valuable startups in the Middle East and North Africa and the first to receive funding from PayPal.
The rise in popularity of the BNPL model, especially among millennials and Gen Z since the start of the pandemic, has projected BNPL transaction values skyrocketing, estimated to become $576 billion by 2026 from $120 billion in 2021 (according to GlobalData).
The company is also competing with Postpay, Cashew, Spotii, and Tamara for a slice of the Middle East’s growing BNPL market.
