11 companies from the Middle East and Africa (MEA) have been featured in this year’s CB Insights Fintech 100, recognized among the top 100 most promising fintech startups in 2025.
The CB Insights Fintech 100 ranking is an annual list which highlights the fintech firms shaping the future of financial services. These companies are selected based on factors such as deal activity, industry partnerships, investor strength, hiring momentum, commercial traction, and CB Insights’ predictive Mosaic Score, which assesses a company’s health, growth, and success potential.
This year’s cohort of 100 companies was selected from over 15,000 companies. They have an average Mosaic Score of 772 out of 1,000 and are scaling fast with 61% average headcount growth over the past year versus the fintech average of 13%. They span 26 countries with a record of 60 winners outside of the US.
Among these, 11 come from MEA, operating across diverse fintech verticals, including payments, digital assets, and wealthtech. These companies have demonstrated significant growth through major funding rounds, market expansions, and new product launches, positioning them for continued momentum in 2025 and beyond.
Ziina (UAE) – 849
Founded in 2020, Ziina is a payment app in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Ziina enables businesses to accept payments through various channels, including websites, retail locations, in-person transactions, and social media. For individuals, it offers the ability to send and receive money using debit and credit cards, as well as Apple Pay and Google Pay.
In September 2024, Ziina raised US$22 million to expand from a payment solution to offering comprehensive financial services for both businesses and consumers. The startup, which transacts US$300 million of volume annually, was featured in the Forbes Middle East Fintech 50, recognized among the region’s leading trailblazers in the digital financial services sector.
Utila (Israel) – 848
Founded in 2022 and headquartered in New York and Tel Aviv, Utila provides a secure, all-in-one digital asset operations platform for institutions. Designed for payment services providers (PSPs), stablecoin products, neobanks, custodians, over-the-counter (OTC) desks, exchanges, and institutional investors, the platform offers secure multi-party computation (MPC) wallets, granular policy controls, robust application programming interfaces (APIs), payments and tokenization engine, and integrations with banking, anti-money laundering (AML), exchanges, decentralized finance (DeFi), and more. It positions itself as the operating system for stablecoins, offering the secure, scalable infrastructure enterprises need to manage digital assets efficiently.
Utila processes more than US$15 billion in monthly volume and has secured over US$90 billion in transactions from more than 200 global institutions. In September 2025, it secured a US$22 million Series A extension, bringing its total Series A round to US$40 million and nearly tripling the company’s valuation.
Thndr (Egypt) – 830
Founded in 2020 and based in Cairo, Thndr is a mobile-first investment platform that allows users to invest in local and international stocks, mutual funds, bonds, and other financial products. The platform serves over 4 million users, and represents 11% of retail trading volume on the Egyptian Stock Exchange (EGX), with US$3.5 billion in traded value. It manages 47% of assets in local gold mutual funds, further reflecting its prominence in the Egyptian investment industry.
Thndr was the entry point for 82% of new retail investors, underscoring its role in improving access to wealth products.
In May 2025, Thndr raised US$15.7 million in new funding, bringing its total current capital to US$37.76 million. The capital aims to support its regional expansion across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), especially in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
Most recently, it released ThndrX, a professional-grade trading platform, and launched Thndr Alpha, a guided investing feature for everyday individuals.
NymCard (UAE) – 826
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Abu Dhabi, NymCard is an embedded finance platform in MENA, offering a full-stack, API-first payment infrastructure for banks, fintech companies, enterprises, and telecom providers. Operating across 10+ countries, NymCard enables seamless card issuance, transaction processing, digital lending, and real-time money movement through its proprietary nCore platform.
To date, NymCard has partnered with 50+ firms, delivering personalized financial offerings across the region. In March 2025, it secured US$33 million in its latest Series B funding round to deepen its presence across MENA, strengthening its payment infrastructure solutions to better serve its customers across its three core verticals of card issuing processing, embedded lending, and money movement.
Khazna (Egypt) – 786
Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Cairo, Khazna is a leading financial super app that offers easy-to-use, technology-driven financial services to underserved segments. The company’s services include salary and pension advances, the Khazna prepaid card, and bill payments. It claims 500,000 customers.
In February 2025, Khazna closed a US$16 million pre-Series B funding round to further fuel its growth by applying for a digital banking license in Egypt and advancing its expansion into the Saudi Arabian market. It aims to secure regulatory approval by mid-2026 and has plans for an eventual IPO on Saudi’s Tadawul Exchange. There are also plans to have nearly half of its business in Saudi within four years, Khazna co-founder and CEO Omar Saleh told TechCrunch earlier this year 2025.
BridgeWise (Israel) – 782
Founded in 2019, BridgeWise is a leader in artificial intelligence (AI) for investments, transforming how investors and institutions access and act on financial insights. The company uses regulatory-compliant, transparent specialized AI models to deliver actionable insights on 37,000 stocks, 12,000 funds, and hundreds of alternative assets. Its products include StockWise, which provides clear AI analysis on 90% of global stocks, FundWise, which simplifies fund and ETF evaluation, and Bridget, the world’s first regulatory-compliant AI chat for investments
BridgeWise claims over 50 institutional clients including Japan Exchange Group, SIX Swiss Exchange, B3, eToro, TASE, and Rakuten Securities, and 25 million end users across more than 15 languages. The company has offices in Israel, the US, Japan, Singapore, London, Brazil, Thailand, and Dubai.
Enza (UAE) – 781
Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Abu Dhabi, Enza provides agile, secure, and locally relevant payment solutions tailored to Africa’s diverse financial ecosystem. Enza’s comprehensive payment solutions empower banks and fintech companies to provide seamless, locally relevant payment capabilities, including cards, wallets, and real-time payments.
These solutions also allow corporate customers to leverage the data generated to cross-sell other financial services products. Existing client use-cases include the enablement of digital payment options such domestic schemes, real-time payments services, mobile money, and buy now, pay later (BNPL), alongside international payment schemes.
Enza operates across Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, and other key markets. In March 2025, the company secured a US$6.75 million seed equity round to strengthen its presence across key markets in Africa, foster deeper partnerships, and improve responsiveness to the localized needs of its growing client base.
Breez Development (Israel) – 776
Founded in 2018 and based in Tel Aviv, Breez is a self-custodial “lightning-as-a-service” company enabling permissionless, peer-to-peer (P2P) bitcoin payments to apps and services globally with the free and open-source Breez SDK.
The Breez SDK provides developers with an end-to-end solution for integrating self-custodial Lightning payments into their apps and services. It eliminates the need for third parties, simplifies the complexities of Bitcoin and Lightning, and enables seamless onboarding for billions of users to the future of peer-to-peer payments.
Breez Development claims that over 40 apps have already implemented its SDK in production or beta. These apps processes over US$4.5 million in gross transaction volume in 2024. Collectively, about 1.5 million users now have access to self-custodial, P2P bitcoin payments through these apps.
In January 2025, Breez Development secured US$5 million to support the development of its non-custodial SDKs.
Affinity (Ghana) – 686
Founded in 2022, Affinity is a digital banking platform that aims to provide affordable and accessible financial services to every Ghanaian individual and business. Powered by a proprietary and secure technology platform, Affinity offers a comprehensive suite of products, including personal and small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) accounts, savings, payments, transfers to banks and mobile money wallets, investments, and loans.
Licensed by the Bank of Ghana as a savings and loans institution, Affinity officially launched operations in October 2024, and now claims more than 100,000 customers.
SeamlessHR (Kenya) – 671
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Lagos, SeamlessHR is an human resource (HR) and payroll technology platform, helping organizations enhance workforce productivity through cloud-based, end-to-end HR solutions.
This platform is designed to streamline the entire employee lifecycle, from recruitment to retirement. Core modules include applicant tracking system (ATS), employee onboarding, payroll, leave management, performance management, talent management, succession and workforce planning, time and attendance management, and learning and development.
SeamlessHR, which has physical offices in Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya, supports nearly 2,000 businesses managing 300,000 employees across 20 countries.
The company raised US$9 million in January 2025 to expand its reach across Africa, enhance workforce productivity, and accelerate business performance through innovative solutions including embedded finance offerings, and AI-driven workforce management technology.
CredibleX (UAE) – 563
Founded in 2023 in Abu Dhabi, CredibleX is an embedded lending platform, enabling businesses to offer their SME customers and distributor partners instant, hassle-free access to credit, directly from the platforms they already use. The company aims to bridge the financing gap for the region’s underserved SMEs, allowing businesses to apply for financing, including receivables financing, payables financing, and short-term loans, in minutes and receive funds within 24-48 hours.
CredibleX works with over 60 distribution partners, and is regulated by the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) at Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) with a lending license. In September 2025, it secured a US$100 million senior secured credit facility from Pollen Street Capital.
Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Middle East, based on image by Darcey Beau via Unsplash
