Tiger Global Makes Latest Bet on Open Banking With Mideast Deal
(Bloomberg) -- Tiger Global Management led a fundraising round for Middle East fintech firm Tarabut Gateway, adding to its series of deals involving open-banking startups around the world in the past few months.
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As part of a rare investment in the region for the New York-based firm, Tarabut has raised $12 million from backers that also include the Dubai International Fintech Fund, the investment vehicle of the emirate’s financial center, according to a statement on Tuesday.
The funding will help Tarabut expand its open-banking platform into Saudi Arabia and North Africa, Tarabut founder and Chief Executive Officer Abdulla Almoayed said in an interview. The firm has now raised $25 million in total over the past eight months.
“We want to create the underlying infrastructure for the next level of financial services in this region and our aspiration is to build a global company from the Middle East,” Almoayed said.
Tiger has made several investments into open-banking startups recently, including Truelayer in the U.K., which achieved a $1 billion valuation in September, and Mono in Africa last month. It also invested in India’s Open in 2019.
The firm is currently raising about $10 billion for its biggest venture fund. It was an early investor in Dubai-based Souq.com, which was sold to Amazon.com Inc. as part of its expansion plans into the Middle East, and has also backed Turkish grocery delivery app Getir.
Tiger’s Coming
“Tiger went into India very aggressively with the investment in Open, and now they are coming into the Middle East even more aggressively,” Almoayed said. “Bringing Tiger on as an investor is a testament to how big we think this can be.”
Fintech and e-commerce startups have been attracting multibillion-dollar valuations, with potential stock market listings in the works. In June, Visa Inc. agreed to buy Swedish open-banking platform Tink AB for 1.8 billion euros ($2.1 billion).
Tarabut is the largest regulated open banking platform in the Middle East and North Africa, according to its website. It serves as a portal for fintech startups looking to get access to data from banks to build new services.
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