SkipCash raised $4 million Series A for Gulf tap-to-phone
SkipCash raised $4 million in February 2026 for Gulf tap-to-phone. The round is real, but merchant counts have split and a later bank stake is undisclosed.
Having tracked Qatar merchant-acquiring disclosures since the 2021 seed, the useful fact about SkipCash is not that a $4 million round exists. It does. Lucidity Insights carried the company release on February 2, 2026, and Wamda published the announcement on February 4. The capital is eight months old. What has moved is the operating picture SkipCash now describes, and it does not match the February telling.
Startup Scene still carries a February 3, 2026 byline on the same item, while the site chrome prints today's date. That is how a closed winter round gets reread as October news. Treat the money as February capital for a Gulf tap-to-phone plan, not as a round that closed this week.
What the February capital was for
The release lists participation from Qatar Development Bank, Qatar Islamic Insurance Company, KBN Holding Group, Finjan Venture Investments, Ula Capital and Doha Tech Angels. It does not name a lead. Proceeds were assigned to the technology stack, a wider tap-to-phone rollout, and entry into further Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) markets.
Tap-to-phone, also labelled SoftPOS in the July release, is the product on the company site: a Near Field Communication (NFC) phone becomes the terminal, with no separate hardware. SkipCash says there that it is licensed and regulated by the Qatar Central Bank (QCB) and compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). The July 27 release instead says the firm is licensed by the Qatar Financial Centre (QFC) and regulated by the QCB. In that same release, Qatar International Islamic Bank (QIIB) took a strategic stake. The amount was not disclosed, and the backer list for the earlier round drops Ula Capital. Adding the two events into one cheque is a guess.
The merchant count will not sit still
On February 2 the company said it served more than 6,000 clients and had processed transactions exceeding QAR 1 billion in 2025. On July 27 the volume line was unchanged and the merchant line had become more than 10,000. The site code, read on October 3, 2026, sets the marketing counters at QAR 999 million-plus of 2025 volume, 5,600-plus active merchants, and 3,400-plus online merchants labelled "onboarded this quarter". That is a third merchant count.
Mohammed Abdulaziz Al-Delaimi, founder and chief executive in the February release, gave a fourth cut. Gulf Times on August 24, 2026 identified him as managing partner and reported monthly volume of around QAR 200 million, with small businesses at 60% of clients. He said: "According to figures released by the Qatar Central Bank, we are currently seeing around QR6bn worth of digital transactions happening every month." A year of exactly QAR 1 billion averages about QAR 83 million a month, so the August run-rate is more than twice that floor. If 2025 finished well above QAR 1 billion, the gap shrinks, and SkipCash has not published the exact total.
"We are proud to close this round, which represents a pivotal milestone in SkipCash's journey," Al-Delaimi said in the February release.
Rivals certify while investors stay quiet
None of the named Series A investors, and not QIIB, has issued an October comment. On September 21, 2026, Geidea said its software point-of-sale product had Mobile Payments on COTS (MPoC) certification in Saudi Arabia and National Payment Gateway approval for e-commerce, with Tap to Pay on iPhone still unfinished. Geidea did not mention SkipCash, and no MPoC listing under SkipCash's name turned up in the sources checked here.
Paymob's $35 million pre-Series C, announced the same day, came with a claim, reported that day, that Gulf revenue had grown sevenfold to near half of the total, and that about 20,000 merchants had joined across three GCC markets since a Central Bank of the UAE licence in January 2025. Tabby's $233 million raise at a $6.5 billion valuation is a different product. Tap Payments said in April 2025 that it held approvals in every GCC market, Qatar included. SkipCash's site still sells a Qatar stack. This desk reported in August that Mastercard and Qatar National Bank had run a Syria card payment they presented as the first international one in more than 15 years. An undisclosed QIIB stake is not that channel yet.
What would make the Gulf plan real
The April 29, 2021 release, carried by Wamda, said SkipCash closed QAR 7 million, stated as $1.92 million, from private Qatari investors. Wamda's headline rounded that seed to $2 million. The release dated the launch to 2018, against 2019 in the Series A text. The next verifiable step is a disclosed QIIB amount, a named licence outside Qatar, or a scheme certification of the kind Geidea published in September. Until one appears, Gulf tap-to-phone remains a February use-of-proceeds line, not an operating market.
Reporting by Rick Steves. Filed 3 October 2026, 14:43 GMT.
Senior Reporter, Regulation and Fintech
Rick Steves has seen business and economics through many lenses. He joined the financial services industry in 2009, and has been a financial journalist since 2011.
