Press Release.
Alaan, a FinTech startup, has announced that it would be launching soon after raising $2.5 million in venture funding. The startup is the first multi-currency spend management platform in the Middle East, allowing SMEs to spend via corporate cards and automatic invoice payments.
468 Capital, Global Founders Capital, and Presight Capital led the seed round, which included a number of angel investors, including Scalable Capital founders Mato Peric, Erik Podzuweit, and Florian Prucker, as well as Philippe Teixeira da Mota, founder of Hedosophia.
Alaan provides virtual cards in a variety of currencies, including AED, SAR, and USD, for e-commerce, SaaS subscriptions, vendor payments, and in-store transactions. Through seamless connectivity with a variety of accounting solution providers, the platform also eliminates expense reports and automates bookkeeping duties.
Parthi Duraisamy, CEO and Co-Founder of Alaan, commented on the upcoming launch. “At Alaan, our vision is to offer SMEs and entrepreneurs an innovative platform to manage company spend, be it through card rails or account-to-account rails. In markets such as the UAE, over 80% of consumer payments are digital. But when it comes to business payments, we haven’t seen substantial transformation and the old world of offline payments still rules. This is where Alaan comes in. We enable businesses to manage expenses smartly, seamlessly and digitize their payment flow.”
Alaan has collaborated with issuers in a number of countries around the region to provide corporate cards and open banking players for efficient invoice payments. Alaan constructed the product and secured partnerships with authorized financial institutions to enable product launch while operating in stealth mode for the past six months.
Alaan is based in Dubai and plans to use the new capital to increase its workforce and scale across different Middle Eastern countries.