About a year after securing its license, Islamic crowdfunding platform Tameed has raised SAR56.75 million (US$15.12 million) in Series A funding, which it will use to fund its expansion plan in Saudi Arabia.
The round was led by Alromaih Group, a diversified Saudi conglomerate.
Founded in 2019, Tameed offers Shariah compliant financing based on government-backed POs, based on a P2P model as the financing extended to SMEs to fund their working capital are crowdfunded from institutional and individual investors. It gained an operating license from the Saudi Central Bank in January last year, after a period of operating within the regulator’s fintech sandbox.
The start-up said it has extended over SAR400 million (US$106.57 million) in financing through its mobile app, which has been downloaded over 50,000 times to date. Its non-performing finance ratio is under 1% while its average annual return stands at 14.5%.
“Funding SMEs working on national and giga projects offers an area of growth and innovation,” shared Mohammed Al Alshaikh, the co-founder of Tameed. “This funding round will enable us to grow Tameed to serve investors and SMEs requiring funding while innovating on the best technologies and products.”
The platform has been aggressively expanding its portfolio: it added a performance bond financing for SME projects as well as an automated investment product allowing investors to invest in short-term funding opportunities based on pre-configured parameters.
“We look forward to see Tameed continue its growth and expand its investment and funding opportunities to meet the needs of SMEs for financing and meet the demand for funding gap created by Vision 2030 programs and projects which is estimated to be SAR300 billion (US$79.93 billion) by 2030,” commented Rayan Al-Romaih, CEO of the investment division of Alromaih Group.