The payment terminal was always in your pocket. Nearpay just wrote the software to prove it.
Nearpay's SoftPOS logo. Founded 2020 in Riyadh by Mohammad Aleban and Hamzah Al Ghamdi - a company that sells the plumbing behind the tap, not the card reader.
Walk into most shops and the machine that takes your card is a dedicated box - leased, certified, and expensive. Nearpay's argument is that the box is redundant. Nearly every smartphone already carries an NFC chip, the same radio that reads a contactless card. Write the right software, get it certified, and the phone becomes the terminal.
That is the whole company in one sentence, and it is deceptively hard to build. Nearpay, legally Tabaod Communications and Information Technology, was founded in Riyadh in 2020 by Mohammad Aleban and Hamzah Al Ghamdi. Its product is "SoftPOS" - software point-of-sale - delivered as an SDK a developer can drop into an app and, per the company's own promise, be accepting NFC card payments in about 30 minutes.
The reason 30 minutes is possible is that Nearpay carries the weight underneath. Accepting a card is the easy part; everything after the tap - authorization, tokenization, PCI compliance, scheme certification, refunds, reconciliation, reporting - is the reason payments companies are hard to build. Nearpay packages all of it as payment infrastructure as a service, so a bank or app maker rents the rails instead of building them.
The market has moved in Nearpay's direction. Contactless is now the default: in the US, where the company launched in 2025, more than 80% of in-store card payments are already tap-based. When the customer is going to tap anyway, the dedicated reader starts to look like the legacy component - and the phone in the merchant's hand looks like the future.
In 2024, Nearpay reported processing more than 40 million transactions - a number that turns the pitch from theory into throughput.
"Our goal is to deliver the highest local and global technological value."Mohammad Aleban, Co-founder & CEO
Aleban has described payments infrastructure as one of the most promising fields of the coming years - with room to tailor solutions to local and regional markets rather than importing ready-made technology from abroad. He frames that localization as part of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030.
Nearpay is B2B. Its customers are banks, acquirers, payment service providers and fintechs who embed the SDK to offer tap-to-phone acceptance to their own merchants - often white-labeled under their own brand. The merchant may never see the Nearpay name.
At the far end are micro-merchants, mobile sellers, retailers and service businesses that want to accept cards without buying, leasing or maintaining terminal hardware - and, increasingly, want multi-currency acceptance.
Terminals cost money, need certification, break, and gate who can accept a card at all. Nearpay removes the device from the equation, lowering the cost and time to "yes, we take cards."
PCI and scheme certification take months and specialist teams. Nearpay does that work once, centrally, so its partners inherit a certified stack instead of building their own.
Turns any NFC-enabled Android, Windows or mobile device into a contactless card reader. Ships for Java, Kotlin, Swift, JavaScript, Flutter and React.
Processing, PCI compliance, network certification, tokenization and security offered as a managed stack partners don't have to build.
White-label dashboards for purchases, refunds, reconciliation, reporting, and user and role management.
Branded SoftPOS apps and payment experiences partners deploy under their own name - as PayTabs did with PayTabs Touch.
REST APIs to connect acceptance to ERPs, acquirers, PSPs and banking systems, with multi-currency support.
Works with Mada, Visa, Mastercard and American Express, and holds PCI CPoC / MPoC-aligned certification for contactless acceptance.
In the US it lines up against Square's Tap to Pay, Stripe Terminal and Fiserv's Clover; regionally against SoftPOS specialists and banks' in-house efforts. Nearpay's angle is the one thing several of those still ship - a reader. It sells the infrastructure, hardware-light, and lets partners put their own face on it.
Instead of manufacturing and distributing readers, Nearpay makes the phone the terminal - cutting cost, logistics and lead time.
It sells the rails and lets others brand the experience - a wholesaler in a market crowded with retailers.
A Saudi-built stack now runs across MENA via PayTabs and is heading into the world's largest card market.
The $14M Series A (December 2023) was led by Sanabil Investments, wholly owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, with participation from stc's Corporate Investment Fund, Vision Ventures, Hala Ventures and Arzan Ventures. Total raised across rounds is roughly $20.3M.
Aleban and Al Ghamdi start Nearpay to build SoftPOS payment infrastructure.
Nearpay becomes one of the first solutions certified under Visa's tap-to-phone program - in its founding year.
Early capital to build out the payment stack.
Funding to scale the platform across the region.
Led by Sanabil (PIF) with stc and Vision Ventures, to fund global expansion.
Powers PayTabs Touch and MEPS FAST; reports 40M+ transactions for the year.
Becomes the first Saudi payments fintech to establish a presence in the United States.
It provides payment-infrastructure-as-a-service, including a certified SoftPOS (tap-to-phone) SDK that turns NFC smartphones into contactless card terminals, plus the processing, compliance, certification and reconciliation stack behind it.
It was founded in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2020 by Mohammad Aleban (CEO) and Hamzah Al Ghamdi (CTO).
About $20.3M total across pre-seed, pre-Series A and a $14M Series A (December 2023) led by Sanabil Investments with stc CIF, Vision Ventures, Hala Ventures and Arzan Ventures.
Banks, acquirers, payment service providers, fintechs and developers who embed Nearpay to offer tap-to-phone acceptance to their merchants - including partners like PayTabs. It is a B2B platform, not a consumer app.
Nearpay is hardware-light: rather than selling card readers, it lets any NFC smartphone act as the terminal via a certified SDK that partners white-label, selling the underlying infrastructure instead of a boxed reader.