Egyptian Founded Tribal raises 60 million USD from SoftBank
Egyptian Founded Tribal, an AI blockchain enabled B2B payments and financing platform for emerging markets, has raised $60M in Series B funding led by SoftBank Latin America Fund.
In addition to Softbank, CoinBase, UAE based BECO Capital, OED Investors and Rising Tide also participated. In addition to the $60M Series B, secondary shares were tapped into to add high-value crypto and strategic investors that included Circle Ventures, AGE Fund, Third Prime, Canas Capital and Acuity Ventures.
Tribal has offices in Egypt, UAE, USA, and Mexico.
To support its growing customer base in over 22 countries and its rapid expansion across Latin America, Tribal will use funds from this round to continue building its local teams in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Chile.
“Tribal is attracting the best talent to power our business growth. We’ve grown our LatAm volume by 90x in 2021,” said Amr Shady, Chief Executive Officer at Tribal. “We’re thrilled to have value-add investors with strong operating experience who share our vision of democratizing access to world-class financial services for emerging-market SMBs.”
The Series B follows Tribal’s recent $40 million crypto and fiat hybrid debt round led by Partners for Growth (PFG) and Stellar Development Foundation (SDF). In Spring 2021, the company also closed a combined Series A and debt round of $34.3 million led by QED Investors as well as PFG, with additional participation in the equity round by SDF — bringing the company’s total funding to $140 million.
“Tribal is using crypto to fundamentally change the rules of the game for payments and lending. Very few companies can bridge TradFi and DeFi in such an innovative, yet seamless way”, said Shu Nyatta, Managing Partner of SoftBank Latin America Fund. “We are incredibly excited to be partnering with Amr and the team as they expand credit for small businesses in emerging markets.”
“At the intersection of crypto, credit, and payments, there are amazing opportunities for FinTechs in emerging markets. We could not be more excited for what 2022 holds for us and our customers,” said Mohamed Elkasstawi, Chief Strategy Officer at Tribal.
Sixty-two million SMBs are transacting globally every year, with the Latin American region representing a $175 billion market opportunity led by Mexico, which is Tribal’s biggest market.
Tribal launched its beta spend management platform to enterprise customers in December 2019. That same year they raised 5 million USD from UAE investors that included BECO Capital. In April 2021, Stellar Foundation invested 3 million USD into Tribal.
The platform offers SMBs in emerging markets access to physical and virtual corporate cards. At the onset of the pandemic, SMBs’ need for better digital B2B financial products grew significantly, prompting Tribal to create Tribal Pay in 2020, which provides customers with international and local wires to 180+ countries and enables them to finance these payments for up to 120 days.
