Alaan Secures $48M Fund in MENA's Largest Series A Round

As a consultant at McKinsey in Dubai, Parthi Duraisamy had learned that his employer used American Express cards for corporate travel, but that none of these would be accepted in the Middle East. As a result, Parthi would pay out of his own pocket for large business travel expenses and spend time filing expense reports.

“The biggest challenge we faced, both in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, was simply going live,” the CEO shared.

Today, Alaan, the company Parthi founded with fellow McKinsey graduate and co-founder Karun Kurien is now the region's foremost spend management platform. The company recently announced it raised $48 million in Series A funding led by Peak XV Partners (previously Sequoia Capital India & SEA). Other participants included investors like the founders of 885 Capital, Y Combinator, 468 Capital, and Pioneer Fund.

Key Highlights

• Alaan secures $48 million Series A funding, one of MENA’s largest fintech rounds.
• First spend management platform in MENA to integrate Apple Pay for B2B finance.
• Alaan pioneers OpenAI integration into fintech, reshaping spend automation in the region

Also to note, the founders of a few of Alaan's unicorn customers, were investors include Hosam Arab (Tabby), Mudassir Sheikha (Careem), and Khalid Al Ameri, a well-known Youtuber in the region.

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This is one of the most sizeable Series A investments for a fintech in the region, and contrasts markedly with Saudi Arabia's buy now, pay later platform, Tamara, which raised $110 million a couple of years ago.

That being said, Alaan's journey to category leadership has not been without its challenges.

Although the fintech had successfully put together a $2.5 million seed round in mid-2021, it was unable to launch for close to a year - much of which was related to the regulatory landscape and partnering with banks in the UAE. When it recently started onboarding customers in Saudi Arabia, it experienced many of the same challenges, taking years to get approvals from the nation's apex bank before finally launching in January.

However, Duraisamy said the fintech was able to move quickly in other places, including being the first company to partner and integrate Apple Pay into its B2B product offerings, which had not been done for finance teams in the region before.

In early 2023, the company also indicated it could be the first in the region to integrate OpenAI into its product offering, which Duraisamy noted had an impact on its current product strategy. When Alaan initially launched, there was a consideration to launch a chatbot, as the company wanted to believe users would prefer to interact conversationally around their spending. However, that feature did not gain traction.

“It was a constant pain,” Duraisamy explained on the call. “I’d spend my weekends uploading receipts, reconciling every expense manually.”

“The category has demonstrated strong product-market fit in the MENA region, and Alaan stands out as the category leader,” said GV Ravishankar, Managing Director at Peak XV. “Their customer-centric and product-led mindset has enabled them to build solutions tailored to modern finance teams.” (Peak XV also participated in a large Series B round last month, backing UAE’s proptech Huspy.)