Revolutionary AI Fintech Alaan Secures $48M in One of the Largest Series A Fundings in MENA History
In the role of a consultant at McKinsey’s Dubai office, Parthi Duraisamy encountered a significant challenge: American Express corporate cards were seldom accepted in the Middle East, leading him to personally cover substantial travel expenses and diligently manage numerous expense reports.
Duraisamy recounted, “This was a constant inconvenience. I’d spend my weekends uploading receipts, manually reconciling every expense.”
Subsequently, Duraisamy, along with fellow McKinsey alumnus Karun Kurien, launched Alaan, now the leading spend management platform in the Middle East. The company recently secured $48 million in Series A funding, led by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India & SEA), with participation from various notable entities such as founders of 885 Capital, Y Combinator, 468 Capital, and Pioneer Fund.
Investors hailing from some of Alaan’s unicorn clientele, including Hosam Arab (Tabby), Mudassir Sheikha (Careem), and Khalid Al Ameri—a renowned regional YouTuber—also contributed to the funding round. This Series A funding is among the largest for a fintech in the region, eclipsed only by Saudi Arabia’s buy now, pay later platform Tamara, which raised $110 million a couple of years prior.
GV Ravishankar, Managing Director at Peak XV, commented on Alaan’s position within the market: “The category has demonstrated strong product-market fit in the MENA region, and Alaan stands out as the category leader. Their customer-centric and product-led mindset has enabled them to build solutions tailored to modern finance teams.”
Although Alaan encountered regulatory complexities and banking partnership challenges during its early stages, it persevered to become a leader in its field. The company’s recent expansion into Saudi Arabia presented similar hurdles, requiring extended approval processes from the country’s central bank before its launch in January of this year.
“The biggest challenge we faced, both in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, was simply going live,” Duraisamy shared.
Despite these obstacles, Alaan demonstrated agility in other areas, such as its pioneering integration of Apple Pay into B2B offerings—a first for finance teams in the region. In early 2023, Alaan became the first Middle Eastern company to integrate OpenAI into its services, a move Duraisamy attributes to shaping the company’s current product strategy. Initially, the introduction of a chatbot met with limited success; however, Alaan subsequently pivoted, focusing on AI-driven automation for processes like receipt matching, reconciliation, and VAT extraction—particularly valuable given the region’s complex VAT regulations and potential tax reclaimability.
Alaan claims its spend management platform has already alleviated more than 1.5 million hours of manual work for finance teams. The company anticipates this figure will continue to grow as it invests further in automation.
Since its launch in 2022, Alaan has processed over 2.5 million transactions for more than 1,500 finance teams across major regional enterprises, including G42, Careem, Tabby, and Lulu Group. Notably, the company is profitable, with Duraisamy citing YC and his mentors for instilling a disciplined approach in a market where many fintechs focus on payment volumes.
Aiming to replicate its success in Saudi Arabia, Alaan plans to leverage the Series A funding for hiring across sales, customer success, and compliance, while also bolstering AI-driven finance automation. Despite raising one of the largest Series A rounds in MENA, Duraisamy maintains that Ramp’s rapid growth—its valuation has doubled this year after three funding rounds—did not significantly influence investors’ decisions to back Alaan.
“When you talk to investors, what really matters for a company at our stage is the fundamentals: how capital-efficient we are, how much revenue we generate, and how strong our go-to-market motion is,” Duraisamy explained. “We are not in a market where size is an advantage, like the US or Europe. So, regardless of whether Ramp was able to raise or not, I think we would have raised this much because our fundamentals were very strong.”
