Tamara Raises $340 million in Series C Funding

Tamara, a buy now pay later platform for consumers in Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC region, has raised $340 million in a financing round that values the fintech at $1 billion, making it the first Saudi fintech unicorn startup. 

Saudi asset manager and financial institution SNB Capital and Sanabil Investments, a wholly-owned company by Saudi’s sovereign wealth fund Public Investment Fund (PIF), led the Series C round. Other backers include Shorooq Partners, Pinnacle Capital, Impulse, and others, joining existing investors such as Checkout.com. The round, composed of primary capital and a transaction of some secondary shares, is among the largest investments in a fintech in the region.

The news comes ten months after the platform, which allows consumers to shop, pay in installments and bank, received debt financing from Goldman Sachs and Shorooq Partners to upsize its warehouse facility to $400 million. With this transaction, Tamara has raised a total of $500 million in equity funding, including secondaries, and over $400 million in debt financing since Abdulmajeed Alsukhan, Turki Bin Zarah and Abdulmohsen Al Babtain started the company in late 2020.

Tamara has over 10 million users across its primary market, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait, that shop from 30,000 partner merchants such as regional and global brands SHEIN, IKEA, Jarir, Noon, eXtra, and Farfetch. Those numbers are similar to what unicorn Tabby, a UAE-born but Riyadh-based BNPL service that operates in both markets and Kuwait, reported this October after raising $200 million at $1.5 billion.