KSA-Based AVA Secures Strategic Investment From Plug And Play Middle East To Scale Cashless Payment Solutions

Jeddah-based fintech startup AVA has secured an undisclosed strategic investment from Plug and Play Middle East following its participation in the Plug and Play Fintech Accelerator Program. 

Founded by Aisha Alsaggaf in Saudi Arabia in 2019, AVA, which stands for “A Virtual Advantage,” develops internet-of-things (IoT)-enabled payment infrastructure designed to digitize unattended retail and mobility sectors. The company, which operates across Saudi Arabia and is expanding beyond the Kingdom, offers a platform that integrates software point of sale (SoftPOS) applications, QR-based payment gateways, and smart IoT switches to enable physical devices to process contactless transactions without relying on traditional POS terminals. Its solutions have been deployed across retail, hospitality, electric vehicle charging, and automated services, supporting the broader shift toward self-service and cashless payment ecosystems. 

In an interview with Inc. Arabia, Alsaggaf noted that the company was born to address a recurring operational inefficiency faced by founders she and her team met with. “We kept meeting entrepreneurs who wanted to start unattended businesses—a laundry vending operation, for example, or a water or coffee vending line—and we noticed the same painful pattern every time,” Alsaggaf said. “To get started, they had to import the machine from China or another overseas market, and that machine would typically cost around 10 times the price of a standard, non-vending version of the same equipment. It usually came with a built-in coin or cash acceptor, which meant cash handling, theft risk, and constant servicing. Integrating that machine with a modern payment terminal was slow, expensive, and in many cases, simply not possible. Then came the after-sales problem: finding anyone locally qualified to fix the machine when it broke was extremely difficult. And if the business didn't work out, reselling that specialized, imported hardware was almost impossible—the owner was stuck with a very expensive piece of metal.” 

AVA’s offering was thus designed to “eliminate every one of those pain points” by enabling businesses to work with existing equipment. “Instead of forcing operators to buy specialized, imported vending hardware, we let them use any ordinary machine and simply connect it through a smart-home-style switch," Alsaggaf explained. "These switches are the same category of device that people normally pair with apps like Google Home or Apple Home—but when they are connected to the AVA system, the machine only turns on after a successful digital payment. No coin acceptor, no cash handling, no proprietary imported hardware, and if the operator ever wants to exit the business, the underlying machine is still a standard, resellable asset.” 

As AVA's model gained traction, its relevance has since extended beyond the Saudi market, with the company identifying similar gaps across multiple geographies, and thereby scaling its deployment globally to more than 3,000,000 connected machines. This expansion is supported by a platform that links physical assets with digital payment capabilities while providing operators with greater visibility over performance and usage. And this integration, Alsaggaf noted, is precisely how AVA adds value to unattended businesses. 

“AVA's mission is simple: to turn every physical touchpoint into an intelligent, cashless revenue-generating node," Alsaggaf explained. "We do that through an integrated stack that brings together SoftPOS, QR-based payment gateways, and IoT-enabled smart switches and controllers that retrofit onto electricity-powered machines so they can accept contactless payments and report operational data in real time. Everything is orchestrated through a unified digital dashboard that lets our clients—today spanning more than 150 hotel brands in Saudi Arabia, as well as partners across retail, hospitality, transportation, and energy—manage payments, operations, and analytics from one place. We see ourselves as a critical enabler of Vision 2030's goal of a 70 percent cashless economy, specifically in the segments that traditional fintech has struggled to reach.” 

For Alsaggaf, securing Plug and Play Middle East's backing for AVA was thus driven by a combination of market need, early traction, and strategic alignment. “First, we are solving a problem that is both urgent and underserved: the unattended-payments segment sits at the intersection of fintech and IoT, and very few teams in the region have the combined hardware, software, and regulatory expertise required to operate there,” she noted. “Second, we walked into the program with real, paying enterprise customers, and a live deployment footprint—the traction data spoke for itself. And third, our model is deeply aligned with Vision 2030 and with Saudi Arabia's broader push to digitize sectors like tourism, hospitality, and mobility, which gave investors a clear, policy-backed growth runway. Plug and Play Middle East brought rigor, global network access, and sharp commercial feedback, and that combination is what turned a strong product into an investable company.” 

Alsaggaf added that the new funding will support further product development and regional expansion, with her seeing the most potential in markets undergoing infrastructure and digital transformation efforts similar to those unfolding in the Kingdom. “The biggest opportunities are in markets that, like Saudi Arabia, are undergoing large-scale infrastructure and tourism build-outs—the UAE, Egypt, and more broadly the GCC," she noted. "Every new hotel, electric vehicle charging network, smart building, entertainment complex, and transit system is a greenfield for unattended payments, and governments across the region are actively pushing cashless agendas. The challenges are real: payment regulation varies meaningfully by market, hardware logistics and certification cycles are longer than pure-software fintechs are used to, and integrating with legacy operational systems is never trivial. Our answer is to expand deliberately—market by market, anchored by strategic partners—rather than chase scale for its own sake.” 

According to Alsaggaf, that same measured approach is particularly critical for her fellow founders in the region building hardware-centric startups, especially in how they position their businesses to investors. “My honest advice is to stop treating hardware as a liability, and start treating it as a moat," she said. "In today's environment, investors are rewarding defensibility, margin discipline, and proximity to revenue—all three of which hardware-enabled fintechs can offer if the model is built correctly. Concretely: keep unit economics transparent from day one, prove contracted revenue before you promise hyper-growth, design for capital efficiency (shared infrastructure, partner-led distribution, asset-light where possible), and align tightly with national priorities so that regulatory and policy tailwinds work in your favor. Communication matters just as much as execution—founders who update investors honestly through volatile cycles, including about what is not working, earn the kind of trust that survives multiple funding environments. Sustainable scaling in our space is less about growing fast and more about compounding reliably.”