Dubai, UAE-based Pemo, a spend management platform has secured $7 million in Pre-Series A round on the occasion of achieving AED 1.4 billion transaction volume. The funding round was led by Augmentum Fintech and Shorooq. The company aims to deploy the funds towards driving product innovation, offering exceptional customer experience, and expanding into GCC, especially Saudi Arabia.
Founded in 2022 by serial entrepreneurs, Rocket Internet and Google alumni, Ayham Gorani, Valerie Konde, Alessandro Duri, and Saed Ghorani with a collective experience of over 15 years experience – scaling over eight ventures, including Zalora and Pleo.
Pemo sports over 4,000 companies in its client base. The company provides corporate virtual and physical cards, and automated tools to deliver full visibility and control of a company’s financial data – helping businesses to make faster, better-informed decisions to fuel their growth.
Pemo’s corporate cards facilitates employees to set limits match receipts, and track company spending through real-time analytics and AI-driven automated accounting to ultimately help them streamline operations, especially with the recent introduction of corporate income tax in the UAE.
Speaking of the core objective of Pemo, Ayham Gorani, Co-Founder of Pemo, said,
“We’ve been on a mission to help businesses save time and money by simplifying expense management and empowering teams to make responsible purchasing decisions,”
“The UAE’s thriving ‘pro-business’ ecosystem has been the perfect foundation for Pemo’s growth, and we’re excited to strengthen our presence further, enhance our product offering, and expand into new markets.” he continued
“We want to help empower these businesses to grow by removing the headaches that drag them down. Having the backing of our incredible investors, who bring a wealth of industry and market knowledge to the fore, will support our expansion and deliver even greater value to our customers.” Ayham added
Expressing his enthusiasm for Pemo and the team, Tim Levene, CEO of fintech-focused investment company Augmentum said,
“Pemo represents an outstanding opportunity in a rapidly growing market, led by a seasoned team with a proven track record in European fintech. We believe Pemo is well-positioned to play a pivotal role in driving economic growth across the Middle East, a region we are closely monitoring and where we see considerable opportunity and exciting developments in the fintech space.”
“With our extensive expertise and network in the fintech sector, we are excited to support Pemo as they embark on this next phase, unlocking the market’s vast potential through transforming expense management and corporate payments, and accelerating the growth of SMEs on a global scale.” Tim added
Along similar lines, Dr. Bilal Baloch, Partner at Shorooq,
“Pemo has been on an exciting journey from day one. We recognised the potential of the business early on, building a value creation plan for the company, and it’s been great to see them go from strength to strength under the leadership of stellar co-founders. We are looking forward to supporting Pemo during its next phase of growth as it enters dynamic new markets and accelerates fast and cost-effective decision-making for SMEs.”
According to Pemo, the company houses over 60 professionals from leading tech companies from both UAE and foreign. Pemo previously raised $12 million in seed funding co-led by Cherry Ventures and Shorooq, with participation from FinTech Collective, Speedinvest, BY Venture Partners, and Antler, as well as some angel investors.
