DUBAI — A Riyadh-based fintech has secured fresh seed funding to help Gulf banks and fintechs plug a persistent gap in the region’s financial infrastructure: fast, reliable credit assessment for small and medium enterprises. Orbii, a credit infrastructure platform founded in 2024, has raised $3.6 million in a seed round led by Prosus Ventures, with participation from VentureSouq, DASH Ventures, Taz Investments and Sanabil 500, the company announced. The deal underscores growing investor appetite for embedded finance tools that can be deployed across the GCC, where SME lending remains underserved relative to the size of the sector.
What Orbii Does and Why It Matters to the UAE
Orbii, founded by Nauman Ali, Guillaume Kieffer and Nasara Mughal, builds AI-powered credit infrastructure that allows banks, fintechs and B2B platforms to launch SME lending products without building underwriting, risk-scoring and loan-management systems from scratch. For UAE-based financial institutions and B2B marketplaces looking to add lending as a revenue line, this kind of white-label infrastructure shortens time-to-market considerably — a factor that matters in a market where digital banks, buy-now-pay-later players and B2B e-commerce platforms are all racing to bundle credit into their offerings.
SMEs account for more than half of non-oil GDP across the UAE and Saudi Arabia, yet they remain chronically underserved by traditional bank credit, which tends to favor larger corporates with longer track records and collateral. Regulators in both markets have pushed lenders to close this gap — the UAE Central Bank has repeatedly flagged SME financing as a policy priority, and Abu Dhabi’s Hub71 and Dubai’s DIFC Innovation Hub have both hosted a wave of alternative-lending startups aiming to address it. Infrastructure providers like Orbii, rather than consumer-facing lenders themselves, represent the plumbing layer that could let UAE banks and fintechs scale SME credit products faster and with lower fixed cost.
Investor Read: Prosus and Riyadh’s Fintech Pull
Prosus Ventures’ backing is notable for UAE and wider Gulf investors tracking capital flows into regional fintech. The Amsterdam-listed investment group has been selective in the Middle East, and its participation in an early-stage Riyadh round signals continued confidence in Saudi Arabia’s fintech scene — one that UAE-based venture funds, including round participant VentureSouq, are increasingly co-investing in alongside Gulf-only vehicles such as Sanabil 500 and Taz Investments.
For UAE fund managers and family offices, the round is another data point in a broader trend: seed-stage fintech infrastructure plays, rather than consumer lending apps, are attracting the sharpest capital in the region right now. Infrastructure businesses carry lower regulatory overhead than direct lenders, since they license technology to regulated entities rather than holding credit risk themselves — a structure that has proven attractive to investors wary of the credit-risk exposure that sank some earlier GCC lending fintechs.
Cross-Border Expansion Potential
Although Orbii is headquartered in Riyadh, credit infrastructure businesses of this kind typically look to expand across GCC markets once they have proven a model with a handful of anchor clients. The UAE’s dense concentration of digital banks, neobanks and B2B trade platforms — from Dubai’s DIFC-licensed fintechs to Abu Dhabi’s ADGM-based lenders — makes it a natural next market for a Saudi-founded infrastructure provider seeking regional scale. Founders building competing or complementary SME-lending tools in the UAE will likely watch Orbii’s rollout closely, both as a potential partner for pooled underwriting data and as a competitive benchmark for speed of bank and fintech onboarding.
The raise adds to a run of GCC seed deals in 2024 and 2025 focused on financial infrastructure rather than front-end consumer products, a shift that Dubai- and Riyadh-based venture investors say reflects a maturing regional fintech stack — one increasingly built to serve banks and platforms rather than to compete with them directly.
