TAMARA

Abdulmajeed Alsukhan had already lived inside Gulf fintech. He helped build parts of the region's payments plumbing before this.

In 2020 he teamed up with Turki Bin Zarah and Abdulmohsen Al Babtin to start Tamara in Riyadh. The problem they saw was simple.

Most Saudis paid cash on delivery because credit cards never really caught on. Buying online meant handing notes to a courier.

Tamara offered a cleaner deal. Buy now.

Pay in four. No interest.

No card required.

A shopper splits a purchase into four interest-free payments, or pays the whole thing in 30 days. The store gets paid in full right away, minus a fee.

That merchant fee is the main way Tamara makes money. Stores agree to it because pay-later shoppers buy more and come back more often.

Tamara also earns from late fees and from newer products like its own card and account. The core is still the split-it-in-four button at checkout.

The main product is Tamara's split-payment checkout. Pay in four or pay in 30 days, interest free.

It also runs Tamara Card, a virtual and physical card that lets people use pay-later at stores that are not direct partners. There is a Tamara account and app that ties it all together, plus tools and dashboards for the merchants who accept it.

The pitch to shoppers is the same everywhere. Get the thing now.

Spread the cost. Pay no interest if you pay on time.

Tamara went where the shoppers already were. It plugged into big regional retailers like SHEIN, Namshi, and IKEA so the pay-later option showed up at checkout for millions of people.

It also leaned hard on the fact that Saudi Arabia has a young population that shops on phones. Then it stacked on a physical and virtual card so people could use Tamara outside partner stores.

By 2024 it said it had more than 10 million users. Distribution through the biggest merchants did most of the heavy lifting.

Pay-later runs on two things. Cheap money to fund the loans and low defaults.

Both got harder as global interest rates climbed. Tamara had to raise big debt lines from banks to keep lending, which is expensive when rates are high.

It also has to guess right on who pays back. Lend to the wrong shoppers and the losses eat the merchant fees fast.

Add rising talk of pay-later regulation across the Gulf, and the model has real pressure on it.

Tamara pulled in serious money from both global and Saudi backers. Its Series C was co-led by SNB Capital, the investment arm of Saudi National Bank, and Sanabil Investments, which is owned by the kingdom's Public Investment Fund.

Earlier rounds brought in Sanabil, Coatue, Shorooq Partners, and Endeavor Catalyst. Checkout.com led its Series A.

On top of equity, Tamara secured large debt facilities from global banks including Goldman Sachs. That mix of sovereign money and global banks gave it both credibility and firepower.