Saudi fintech Tabby raises $233m at a $6.5bn valuation
Tabby raised $233m at a $6.5bn valuation led by Blue Pool Capital, but the small primary cheque shows Gulf BNPL's real growth funding is now debt, not equity.
Tabby, the Saudi-headquartered consumer finance company, has raised $233 million at a $6.5 billion valuation in a Series F led by existing backer Blue Pool Capital. The most instructive number in the deal is not the valuation but the ratio: $233 million is roughly 3.6 per cent of the post-money mark, which makes this a price-setting and liquidity event rather than the growth capital that will actually fund Tabby’s move beyond Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL).
Having tracked the BNPL cohort’s conversion into licensed lenders since 2023, the pattern is consistent: the equity headline gets the attention, the debt facility does the work. Bloomberg reported in October 2025 that Tabby had been marked at $4.5 billion in a secondary sale. Getting from there to $6.5 billion took under 11 months and added roughly $2 billion of paper value on $233 million of new primary money — a 44 per cent step-up that reprices existing holders far more than it recapitalises the business.
The round was announced on September 14, 2026, with HSG, Wellington Management and Arbor Ventures participating alongside Blue Pool Capital, the Hong Kong family office backed by Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai. It also carries a liquidity option for employees. Tabby says it has run share tenders since 2023 that have allowed staff to sell more than $100 million of stock. The company further states that it processes more than $18 billion in annualised transaction volume, has 25 million registered users and 70,000 business partners, and has been profitable since 2023. None of those figures are audited or independently verified, and Tabby is not a listed issuer, so they should be read as company disclosure rather than established fact.
What is verifiable is the licence stack. Tabby holds consumer and small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) financing licences from the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA), acquired the SAMA-licensed digital wallet Tweeq to add accounts, cards and transfers, and secured a Stored Value Facilities licence from the UAE Central Bank to launch Tabby Cash, according to the company and Arab News. That is the regulatory perimeter of a multi-product credit and money-management business, not a checkout button.
The competitive response is already on the record, and it supports the debt thesis. Tamara, Tabby’s closest Saudi rival, secured an asset-backed, Shariah-compliant facility of up to $2.4 billion from Goldman Sachs, Citi and Apollo — $1.4 billion funded upfront with a further $1 billion available over three years, refinancing a prior $500 million Goldman facility, FinTech Futures reported. Tamara says it serves 20 million customers and around 87,000 businesses across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain. On the company-supplied numbers, Tamara’s merchant base is larger than Tabby’s; its funding line is ten times Tabby’s equity round.
“We began with a button at an online checkout to help people spread costs over time,” said Hosam Arab, CEO and co-founder of Tabby. “Everything since, every product and every licence, has come back to the same idea: people deserve more from their money. This round means we can build further on that, without changing how we think about growth or discipline.”
Christopher Wu, Chief Investment Officer at Blue Pool Capital, said Tabby had evolved “beyond payments to become the trusted platform for millions of people managing, spending and growing their money across the region”, citing a three-year partnership with the company.
For payment providers and bank product teams in the Gulf, the operative detail is distribution. A counterparty with 70,000 merchant relationships and a wallet licence sits between the acquirer and the consumer at the moment credit is offered, which is where the margin in embedded lending accrues. The same trade is running elsewhere: Klarna’s launch of a US Visa debit card and Riverty’s Luxembourg bank charter are the European and US versions of it, while divergent BNPL rules across four jurisdictions are making a licence the cheapest route to product breadth. Saudi policy is pulling the same direction: the number of fintech firms in the Kingdom rose from 82 in 2022 to 281 by August 2025 against a National Fintech Strategy target of 525 by 2030.
Expect Tabby’s next material announcement to be a warehouse or asset-backed facility rather than another equity round. A licensed balance-sheet lender is constrained by funding cost, not by equity, and $233 million does not underwrite consumer credit at Gulf scale. The employee liquidity option points the same way, relieving the pressure that usually forces a listing — a pattern visible in late-stage rounds from Airwallex’s $320 million Series H to Cashea’s $100 million raise. On that reading, a Tabby initial public offering is further away today than it was before the round.
Reporting by Rick Steves. Filed 16 September 2026, 19:41 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.
