A Riyadh fintech that folds banking, cards, point-of-sale, expense management and financing into a single account - and puts it in the hands of the businesses big banks tend to overlook.
Walk into a small shop in Riyadh, a freelance designer's home office, or a growing e-commerce operation packing orders in Jeddah, and you will find a common set of frustrations. Opening a business account takes paperwork and patience. Accepting card payments means a bulky terminal and a wait for settlement. Tracking who spent what, paying suppliers, chasing an invoice, applying for a short line of credit to cover a slow month - each is its own errand, its own login, its own headache. HALA was built to make those errands disappear.
Founded in 2018 by Esam AlNahdi and Maher Loubieh, HALA describes its ambition plainly: to build "the bank of the future for SMEs." That is a large claim in a market where banking has traditionally been organized around large corporations and salaried consumers. Micro, small and medium enterprises - the shops, the freelancers, the family businesses - have long been treated as too small to serve well and too risky to lend to easily. HALA's bet was that this neglected middle was, in fact, an enormous market waiting for the right product.
The product is a platform. On one screen, a business can open a digital IBAN account, issue Visa and Mada cards to itself and its staff, accept card and wallet payments in store or online, manage and approve expenses, run payroll, pay bills through Sadad, and apply for financing. Each of those pieces exists elsewhere as a standalone service. HALA's insight - the one that turns a collection of features into a company - is that a small business owner does not want six apps. They want one, and they want the financial admin to fade into the background so they can get back to running the business.
That focus has produced real scale. HALA now serves more than 140,000 businesses, with over 100,000 using the platform on any given day, and processes more than $8 billion in transactions each year. The company operates under the supervision of the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA), the regulatory foundation that lets it hold money, issue cards and lend - and the reason a shop owner can trust it with their daily takings.
In September 2025 that trajectory drew a landmark endorsement. HALA raised $157 million in a Series B round co-led by TPG and Sanabil Investments, a division of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, with participation from QED Investors, Raed Ventures and a long list of regional funds. It was one of the largest fintech Series B rounds the Middle East has seen, and it valued the company at a reported figure near $900 million. The capital, HALA said, would deepen its position in Saudi Arabia, expand its embedded financial services, add lending products for MSMEs and freelancers, and fund regional expansion.
What makes the round notable is less the number than the signal. When a global private-equity firm and a sovereign-linked investor co-lead the same round, they are agreeing on a thesis: that serving small businesses in Saudi Arabia is not a niche but a foundation. Vision 2030, the kingdom's economic reform program, has made a cashless economy and a thriving private sector explicit goals. Companies like HALA are the plumbing that makes those goals concrete - unglamorous, essential infrastructure for the businesses that employ most people.
"Building the bank of the future for SMEs."
HALA has not built every piece from scratch. Part of its strategy has been acquisition. In 2021 it bought Fresh, a Saudi point-of-sale startup, to strengthen in-store payment acceptance. In early 2023, at the LEAP technology event, it acquired Paymennt.com, a UAE-based online-payments company serving thousands of micro and small merchants across the Emirates and Jordan. That deal added online and omnichannel payments to a platform that had grown up around in-store and account services. The logic is straightforward: a small business does not distinguish between "in-store" and "online" money - it is all revenue - so the platform that serves it should not either.
The result is a company that competes on completeness rather than on a single clever feature. Standalone payment processors, card issuers, expense tools and lenders all exist across MENA - names like Geidea, Tap Payments, PayTabs and Foodics Pay, alongside the SME digital arms of traditional banks. HALA's differentiation is that it stitches these functions together for one customer type and takes responsibility for the whole workflow. For a busy owner, the value is not any one product; it is the number of separate relationships they no longer have to manage.
How does HALA make money? Like most modern fintechs, it earns across the workflow rather than from a single fee: merchant-acquiring and payment-processing fees when a business gets paid, interchange on the cards it issues, account and subscription fees, and interest and fees on the financing it extends. Because the platform touches so many moments in a business's financial life, each active customer represents multiple, compounding revenue lines - which is precisely what makes the model attractive to investors betting on 140,000 businesses and counting.
The expertise underneath is a blend that is hard to assemble: payments engineering, card issuing and network integrations with Visa and Mada, credit underwriting for thin-file small businesses, and the compliance discipline required to operate under SAMA. With roughly 660 employees, HALA has built the kind of regulated, full-stack fintech that is difficult to replicate quickly - which is part of why capital has flowed to the incumbent rather than to a dozen new entrants.
Where it fits in the market is clear enough. HALA is not trying to be a consumer super-app or a wholesale bank. It has chosen the small and medium business - the freelancer, the merchant, the growing SME - and refused to drift. In a region where most job creation happens inside exactly those businesses, and where a national reform agenda is actively pushing digital finance, that is a large and defensible place to stand. The company still has to prove that lending to small businesses can be done profitably at scale, and that its model travels beyond Saudi Arabia. But the direction is set, the regulator is on board, and the customers - more than a hundred thousand of them, every day - have already voted.
Figures are drawn from company statements and press reporting around HALA's September 2025 Series B; some metrics are approximate and revenue is an external estimate.
Digital IBAN accounts for freelancers, SMEs, corporates and multi-user teams - receive, spend, transfer, withdraw and pay bills.
Visa and Mada debit cards plus corporate expense cards issued to a business and its employees, with spend controls.
POS devices and a mobile soft-POS app that turns an Android phone into a card and wallet terminal with fast settlement.
Local IBAN transfers, wallet-to-wallet transfers, IBAN and wallet deposits, and Sadad bill payments in one flow.
Cloud expense tracking, approval workflows, corporate-card controls and real-time monitoring of business spend.
Fast business financing and lending products tailored to the cash-flow reality of SMEs and freelancers.
Payroll processing wired into business accounts and cards, so paying staff lives in the same place as everything else.
Co-founded HALA in 2018 and chairs the company, helping steer its strategy from a payments startup into a full-stack SME banking platform serving well over a hundred thousand businesses.
Co-founded HALA and leads it as chief executive, driving its product expansion, its acquisitions of Fresh and Paymennt.com, and its landmark $157M Series B.
HALA is a Saudi fintech that provides business accounts, card issuance, POS and online payment acceptance, expense management and financing for small and medium enterprises and freelancers - all on one SAMA-regulated platform.
HALA was founded in 2018 by Esam AlNahdi (Chairman) and Maher Loubieh (CEO), and is headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
HALA raised a $157 million Series B in September 2025, co-led by TPG and Sanabil Investments, reportedly valuing the company at around $900 million. Total funding is estimated above $160 million.
HALA serves more than 140,000 businesses and processes over $8 billion in transactions annually, with 100,000+ businesses using the platform daily.
Yes. HALA operates under the supervision and control of the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA).
Compiled from public sources. Some figures are approximate; verify current details with HALA directly.