The problem
Getting paid as a freelancer or small shop in the UAE used to mean cash on delivery, manual bank transfers, or renting point-of-sale hardware — while splitting a bill with friends meant an awkward round of transfers. The 560,000 SMEs that make up over 94% of UAE companies had few payment tools built for their size.
How it works
Ziina started as a peer-to-peer wallet: send and receive money with just a phone number. It then layered business tools on top — shareable payment links, QR-code payments, and Tap to Pay that turns a phone into a card terminal — plus spend management, all under its Central Bank Stored Value Facility licence.
Pain points
Cash handling and end-of-day reconciliation, the cost and hassle of POS terminals for micro-merchants, slow interbank transfers for everyday splits, and freelancers with no simple way to request and track client payments.
Business model
Payments volume is the engine: consumer transfers drive adoption while SME collection products monetise it, with Ziina expanding from a payments app toward end-to-end financial services for businesses and consumers.
Challenges
Bank apps and global wallets chase the same users; rival UAE fintechs serve the same SME till; and the Series A pitch — evolving into full financial services — means executing on lending-grade products, not just transfers.
Funding
- Raised: $22M Series A (Sep 2024) led by US-based Altos Ventures, with Fintech Collective, Avenir Growth, Activant Capital, Y Combinator, FJ Labs, MEVP, and Jabbar Internet Group.
- Context: the round closed during a global fintech funding slump (from $144.2B in 2021 to $40.7B in 2023), which the company presented as a vote of confidence alongside tenfold annual revenue growth.
Latest — January 2026
In January 2026 Lean Technologies and Ziina announced the UAE’s first live customer-initiated open finance payment under the Central Bank’s Open Finance framework — letting Ziina users pay directly from their bank accounts inside the Ziina experience.