Amwal, a Saudi Arabia-based fintech firm, has recently raised $2.5 million in a pre-seed round, co-led by Shorooq Partners and Outliers Venture Capital alongside angel investors.
Founded in 2022 by Mohamed Zaghoo and Reda Reda, the startup seeks to improve the authentication of money on a global scale by using tokenisation, device identity, and fraud prevention to develop a single API.
The Saudi Central Bank has also approved a cryptographic biometric checkout solution developed by Amwal.
The funds will be used by Amwal to further develop their technology and expand in the MENA region, where over 50 million online transactions take place per day.
The current authentication methods, such as credential-based passwords and one-time passwords, are costly to maintain and are vulnerable to phishing.
Amwal provides merchants with a 35 percent increase in checkout conversion by removing the friction associated with account creation, authentication, shipping address, and payment details.
Wamda – a platform of programs and networks that aims to accelerate entrepreneurship ecosystems across MENA – notes that the investment will enable Amwal to contribute to the payment market in the MENA region, which is estimated to be worth $250-billion.