Dubai-headquartered Fintech firm Alaan has acquired $2.5 million in capital via an investment round. The firm is now coming out of stealth mode.
The multi-currency spend management platform developers noted that they would use the proceeds to hire new talent and scale operations across the Middle East.
Alaan’s investment round has been led by California’s investment fund Presight Capital and Berlin’s VC companies 468 Capital and Global Founders Capital.
Several angel investors also took part in the round. They reportedly include Mato Peric, Erik Podzuweit and Florian Prucker, founders of Scalable Capital, along with Philippe Teixeira da Mota, founder of Hedosophia.
Alaan, which was established in 2021, plans to manage all company expenditure via corporate cards and automated invoice payments.
Parthi Duraisamy, CEO and Co- founder of Alaan, stated:
“Our vision is to offer SMEs [small and medium enterprises] and entrepreneurs an innovative platform to manage company spend, be it through card rails or account-to-account rails. In markets such as the UAE, over 80 per cent of consumer payments are digital. But when it comes to business payments, we haven’t seen substantial transformation and the old world of offline payments still rules. This is where Alaan comes in.”
The Alaan platform offers workers with corporate cards to make company purchases and “automatically reconciles spending in real-time.”
The platform is able to quickly issue virtual cards in international currencies such as the UAE dirham, Saudi riyals and the US dollar, for digital commerce transfers, subscriptions, vendor payments and in-store purchases.
The platform aims to eliminate the requirement for expense reports and automates book-keeping tasks via integration with different accounting service providers.
Startups in the MENA region acquired a record amount of VC funding worth $2.6 billion during 2021 via 590 deals. This, according to a report from Magnitt. Around 35 startups announced exits last year, which suggests that the ecosystem is maturing.
Ludwig Ensthaler, general partner at 468 Capital, stated:
“Every company in the region uses different tools for payments, with finance teams spending hours working on manual tasks. Although more than 97 per cent of all business entities in the Middle East are SMEs, they are largely underserved by traditional financial institutions. We were impressed by [Alaan’s] vision to help SMEs in the region digitise their payment flow using an exceptional platform that we believe is set to revolutionise spend management.”
Alaan has teamed up with various issuers in countries across the region to issue corporate cards.
While in the stealth mode for around six months, the firm created the product and entered key partnerships with compliant financial institutions to accelerate product launch.
Karun Kurien, Co-founder and Head of Product and Technology at Alaan, added:
“We founded Alaan after experiencing first-hand the frustrating expense and invoice management processes. We have solved critical pain points in the end-to-end payment flow by building a software layer on top of the regulated banking infrastructure,”