Riyadh, Saudi Arabia-based Lean, a fintech platform today announced that it has raised $3.5 million in a seed round from RAED Ventures with participation from Shorooq Partners, Outliers VC, Rocket Internet’s Global Founders Capital, and Global Ventures. A number of angel investors from MENA and US also participated in the round including Samih Toukan, Co-Founder of Souq.com and Maktoob.com; and Jake Seid, Former Partner and Managing Director at Lightspeed Ventures, among others.
Started in 2019 by Hisham Al-Falih, Aditya Sarkar, and Ashu Gupta, Lean is a B2B platform that builds developer-friendly APIs to provide businesses working in the fintech sector with access to customer financial data and payment initiation capabilities. The company directly integrates with financial institutions and provides them API integration layer to complement their existing infrastructure. The company’s technology provides Financial Institutions with full transparency, oversight, and control over the data being shared by their customers, while also achieving full open banking compliance. As a result, FinTechs can integrate with a multitude of financial institutions in the region through a single platform – the Lean Universal API.
The company will utilise the freshly-raised funds towards hiring the best talent globally to provide a secure, reliable, and consistent way to access data.
Commenting on the funding round, Hisham Al-Falih, CEO of Lean in a statement to MAGNiTT said,
“We were humbled by the level of interest we received from investors and are lucky to have found partners who have a great deal of experience in helping their startups succeed.”
Al-Falih also added,
“At Lean, we go to great lengths to ensure that customers are well informed about their rights and privileges, as they ultimately are the beneficial owners of their own data and must make informed decisions on how to utilize it to their best advantage. Furthermore, we have taken each and every precaution to ensure that customer data is secure, private, and only shared with third parties explicitly authorized by the customer.”
Leans is in process of integrating and going live with several banks in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and projecting a launch in the UAE, Kuwait, and Egypt. The company is aiming to be operational in most of the Middle East countries by 2021.
Affirming his confidence in Lean, Omar A. Almajdouie, Founding Partner at Raed Ventures said,
“Financial inclusion is a great mission that needs the right infrastructure to thrive. Hisham, Aditya, and Ashu built Lean Technologies to ensure that FinTech innovators have a seamless platform to build the greatest products for their communities in the Middle East. The founders are determined and definitely capable to achieve this mission.”
Mahmoud Adi, Founding Partner at Shorooq Partners commented,
“Lean is the missing piece for the Middle East FinTech ecosystem. The company will be the enabler of FinTech innovation in the region. This will accelerate growth in the FinTech ecosystem and create seamless consumer experiences so that we can all benefit from simpler financial lives. With data accessibility becoming increasingly pivotal in the space, we are truly excited about Lean’s journey ahead.”
And Mohammed Almeshekah, Founding Partner of Outliers, shared,
“We are very proud to be backing Hisham, Aditya, and Ashu, the founding team of Lean, as they build the digital infrastructure of the FinTech eco-system in MENA. Lean is strongly positioned to be the conduit of financial data and connectivity with a strong technical foundation built on trust and data security.”
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