TABBY

Hosam Arab already knew Gulf e-commerce cold. He co-founded Namshi, a fashion site that became one of the region's biggest online retailers.

Watching shoppers there, he saw a problem. Most people paid cash on delivery because they distrusted or lacked cards.

In 2019 he teamed up with Daniil Barkalov to launch Tabby. The pitch was simple.

Let people buy now and pay in installments, with no interest, in a market credit cards never fully cracked.

Tabby lets a shopper split a purchase into four interest-free payments or pay in 30 days. The store gets paid in full upfront, minus a fee.

That merchant fee is the main revenue. Stores pay it because pay-later shoppers buy more and come back to spend again.

Tabby has grown into a broader money app too, adding a card and an account. The core, though, is still that split-it-in-four button at checkout.

Tabby is the core product, a pay-later option that splits a purchase into four or pushes it 30 days out. There is Tabby Card, a way to use that credit in more places.

The Tabby app has grown into a shopping and money hub, with rewards and account features. Underneath it all is the underwriting that decides, in seconds, who gets to pay later.

Tabby grew by owning two markets first, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, instead of spreading thin. It signed major regional and global retailers, from fashion to electronics, so its button showed up everywhere shoppers already were.

It also used the region's cash-on-delivery habit as a wedge, offering a trusted way to pay later that felt safer than a card. Then it expanded into Kuwait and Egypt and moved its base toward Riyadh, positioning for a Saudi listing.

Pay-later runs on cheap money and low defaults, and both got harder. As global interest rates rose, funding the loans became more expensive.

Tabby leaned on big debt facilities, including hundreds of millions from global banks, to keep lending. It also faces the same worry as every pay-later firm.

If too many shoppers stop paying, the model cracks. Add tightening regulation across the Gulf, and a clean public listing is real work, not a given.

Tabby pulled in a who's who of global and regional investors. Sequoia Capital India, now Peak XV, and Saudi Arabia's STV backed it early.

The 2023 unicorn round was led by Wellington Management, with PayPal Ventures, Arbor Ventures, and Mubadala among the names. A later round reportedly drew Blue Pool Capital and Saudi pension giant Hassana.

That roster, plus large debt lines from global banks, gave Tabby both credibility and firepower.