seedMamo

Mamo gives UAE SMEs one home for payments, cards, and expenses

A DFSA-licensed financial platform where small businesses collect payments, issue corporate cards, and manage expenses in one place.

منصة مالية إماراتية مرخّصة تجمع تحصيل المدفوعات والبطاقات المصرفية وإدارة المصروفات للشركات الصغيرة والمتوسطة في مكان واحد.

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  1. The Bottleneck

    What was broken?

    UAE SMEs juggle separate vendors for getting paid, company cards, and expense tracking — while banks underserve smaller firms, leaving finance work scattered and manual.

  2. The Move

    Why it worked

    One DFSA-licensed platform consolidating payment collection, corporate cards, and expense management, built product-first for SMEs that banks overlook.

  3. The Trap

    Battle scars

    Regional expansion into Saudi Arabia means new licensing and go-to-market costs; and larger banks plus rival SME fintechs are all chasing the same consolidated-finance pitch.

The problem

SMEs make up 94% of companies operating in the UAE, yet banks underserve them — so a small firm ends up stitching together one tool to get paid, another for staff cards, and spreadsheets for expenses, with finance work scattered across vendors.

How it works

Mamo offers a single regulated platform: collect customer payments, issue corporate cards to the team, and manage and approve expenses from one dashboard. The company positions the product as infrastructure for SME payments and spend management rather than a single-feature app.

Pain points

Fragmented collection and payout tools, employees floating business spend on personal cards, manual reconciliation at month-end, and bank onboarding that prices small firms out.

Business model

Consolidation economics: Mamo monetises the payment-collection, card-spend, and expense-management volume flowing through its platform, deepening the relationship as SMEs adopt more of the suite.

Challenges

Testing product lines in Saudi Arabia brings fresh licensing and distribution costs; at home, banks are waking up to SME banking while rival fintechs pitch the same all-in-one story — so Mamo has to keep shipping product faster than incumbents can copy it.

Funding

  • Raised: $3.4M (Jul 2024) from existing investor 4DX Ventures plus Dubai Future District Fund and Cyfr Capital, earmarked for UAE product expansion and testing in Saudi Arabia.
  • Total: $13M raised to date, following a $1.5M round in 2019 and an $8M round in 2021 (Entrepreneur Middle East, Aug 2024).

Latest — May 2025

In May 2025 Ripple named Mamo (Mamo Pay) alongside Zand Bank as its first UAE clients live on Ripple Payments for blockchain-powered cross-border transfers — putting Mamo’s rails inside one of the world’s top remittance hubs.

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