In an era where it has become tougher to raise venture capital, many companies have turned to non-dilutive, revenue-based financing (RBF) as an alternative. As a result, plenty of startups have risen to meet that challenge, none more so than in the MENA region, which has taken to the model like a duck to water. The latest is CredibleX which has raised a $55 million seed financing round led by Abu Dhabi-based Further Ventures in order to take advantage of the booming market for revenue financing in the Middle East.
Providing working capital financing to small and medium-sized businesses, CredibleX operates in a market where we saw companies like MENA competitors FlapKap and Flow48 scale and raise capital in 2023, not to mention others elsewhere like Modifi (raised $353.6 million to date), Drip Capital ($528.1 million to date), and Incomlend ($25 million to date).
So what’s going on here?
With MENA SMEs (small/medium enterprises) still finding it difficult to access working capital from traditional banking channels, CredibleX has found a route to market. It partners with large aggregators and then goes after the SMEs in their vertical ecosystem.
CEO and co-founder Anand Nagaraj told TechCrunch: “We believe this approach helps us in recovering repayments easily as we have a direct relationship with the debtor/payer. Most of the others in this space work with the SMEs to try and get an assignment of receivables/sales.”
In particular, revenue-based financing works quite well for SMEs in high-income countries like the UAE, and similar countries, since it’s harder to obtain financing from so-called Development Finance Institutions, which are primarily set up to invest in projects in less economically developed countries.
How the platform works is very “MENA region,” given the explosion of platforms set up for service-based industries like restaurants, of which there are millions in MENA.
Here’s an example: An SME such as a restaurant uses a platform like Talabat (acquired by Delivery Hero in 2015 for $158.52 million) to deliver its food, and wants to access RBF. It applies for a loan through the Talabat platform integrated with CredibleX, uploads its historical sales data/ratings, and then CredibleX makes the credit decision on issuing a loan, all within 24 hours.
The restaurant then pays the loan back in the form of Talabat making payments directly to CredibleX (which also has similar relationships with 37 other such partners).
The company started operations in March 2024 and claims to have so issued over AED 100 million (US$27 million) to SMEs.
Nagaraj previously worked at Citi, then set up Invoice Bazaar, a supply chain finance platform helping SMEs that supply to large corporations with early payments. After exiting that startup in 2021, Nagaraj, along with co-founders Ahmad Malik and Hassan Reda, launched CredibleX.
Nagaraj explained: “Our approach helps us to access a larger pool of SMEs and it certainly helps when things go bad, in terms of recovering repayments from the SMEs.” CredibleX is also fully regulated by FSRA at Abu Dhabi Global Markets.
The seed round consists of equity from Further Ventures and debt from various providers, including Kilgour Williams Capital. Further Ventures has LPs that include ADQ and Mastercard.