Riyadh startup Orbii raised $3.6M to build the AI credit infrastructure banks and fintechs use to launch SME loans, aimed at MENA's huge small-business credit gap.

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Small businesses in the Gulf find that the hardest part of borrowing money is not the interest rate, it’s the wait. A wholesaler in Jeddah could spend weeks gathering the right paperwork, bank statements, invoices, tax filings, only to be told the numbers did not fit a template built which was built for a company ten times their size. Small businesses across the MENA region receive just 8 per cent of total bank credit against roughly 22 per cent in high income economies, as per the World Bank.

One company saw this gap and is looking to fill it, but without lending at all.

Orbii, a Riyadh-based startup founded in 2024, has raised $3.6 million in a seed round led by Prosus Ventures, with participation from VentureSouq, DASH Ventures, Taz Investments, and Sanabil 500. The company builds credit infrastructure in software that sits beneath banks, fintechs, and business platforms, and performs the role of deciding whether a loan should be approved in seconds. This software is plugged directly into the systems that are already being run within this institutions, from core banking to point-of-sale terminals and enterprise resource planning software. It automates the underwriting, disbursement and monitoring that used to move at the speed of a loan officer's inbox.

The Invisible Layer Where Fintech Money is Moving

For most of the last decade, fintech capital in emerging markets chased consumer-facing brands. The apps we use every day, the payment app, the buy-now-pay-later button, the neobank. Investors are now backing the layer underneath, the plumbing that lets companies offer credit without hiring a risk team or building decision engines from scratch. The same logic applied to turning Strips, Plaid, and Parafin into infrastructure businesses in the United States. Double margins accrue to whoever holds the rails, not to the lender.

Orbii fits the mold of a platform that is modular and lets a bank or B2B marketplace launch and test a lending product without rebuidign credit functions internally. The decision systems take raw financial data and parses and enriches it. It scores applicants using what the company says are more than 1,000 derived financial metrics, profiling cash runway, repayment capacity, and behavioral risk. The products it can power span salary advances, merchant financing, working capital loans, embedded lending, and buy-now-pay-later.

Orbii’s ambition is to make credit feel less like an application and more like a feature already switched on.

"We envision a MENA where every business can access credit instantly, embedded within the systems and workflows they already use. Credit decisioning won't be a process, it'll be a reflex," said Nauman Ali, Orbii's Co-founder and Chief Executive.

A Credit Gap Measured in the Hundreds of Billions

A World Bank and Union of Arab Banks survey of more than 130 regional banks found that 63 percent of SMEs in MENA lack access to finance, with the financing shortfall estimated as high as $240 billion. Small firms make up the vast majority of registered businesses across the region and employ a large share of its workforce, yet they remain structurally underserved by institutions that find them expensive to assess and risky to lend to one at a time.

Saudi Arabia has created government-backed reforms to push lending to micro, small, and medium enterprises to around $94 billion in 2024. However, these firms still bank for well under a tenth of the total number of bank loans in the Kingdom. The appeal of automated infrastructure is that it lowers the cost of evaluating a small borrower to the point where the loan becomes worth making at all, which is precisely the economic bottleneck that has kept smaller tickets uneconomical for traditional lenders.

That is also why the broader category is growing quickly. One industry estimate puts the global embedded lending market at roughly $21.5 billion in 2025, with SMEs the largest segment, while the Middle East's alternative lending market is forecast to expand toward $31 billion by the end of the decade. The regional fintech sector overall is projected to nearly double to more than $10 billion by 2030.

Why Saudi Arabia, and Why Now

Saudi Arabia led Middle East venture capital in 2025, pulling in about $1.72 billion, up 145 percent year on year, and recording its most active year by deal count. The Kingdom's Vision 2030 program has made financial inclusion and a cashless economy explicit policy goals which hit its non-cash transaction targets years ahead of schedule. Fintech Saudi, an initiative of the Saudi Central Bank and the Capital Market Authority, has spent several years building the regulatory scaffolding, and in September 2025, the same month Orbii announced its raise, Riyadh hosted the inaugural Middle East edition of Money20/20, a signal that the Gulf now sees itself as a fintech hub rather than a follower.

Prosus, the Amsterdam-listed technology investor behind the round, has been steadily building a Gulf portfolio, backing Arabic-language AI, secondary-share platforms, and banking software in the region over the past year. Its interest in Orbii reflects a familiar investor preference for the tooling layer over any single lender.

"From day one, Orbii impressed us with how quickly their solution can be implemented, the depth of expertise across the team, and the tangible results they deliver for clients," said Robin Voogd, head of Middle East investments at Prosus Ventures.

The Part the Announcement Leaves Out

The company says it has already processed thousands of applications and helped approve millions of dollars in loans, and it wants to power $1 billion in SME lending by 2026. That is a steep curve from where the numbers stand today, and it is worth treating the target as a statement of ambition rather than a forecast.

It is worth being noted that automated underwriting is cheapest and most impressive in benign conditions, when defaults are low and data is plentiful. The real test will be in the downturn, when a model trained on good times has to distinguish between a temporarily strained business from a failing one. To date, credit-decision infrastructure across the industry has not been stress-tested enough through a full economic cycle the way decades-old bank underwriting has. The SME segment is exactly where losses tend to concentrate when conditions turn. A system that approves loans in seconds can also approve bad loans in seconds.

Data quality remains a constraint as a borrower-intellegence engine is only as good as the fincncial signals it can see. Many small firms in the region still operate with thin or informal records. A third variable that comes into play is regulation. As the Saudi Central Bank continues to tighten expectations around lending, data, and consumer protection, the speed at which the processes run can slow down the experience providers promise. Orbii is not the only one noticing the opportunity as banks, established fintechs, and rival infrastructure circle the same gap.

The most valuable position in a lending market is often the layer that every lender depends on and few can see. Whether credit truly becomes a reflex in the Gulf will depend less on how fast the software can say yes, and more on whether it keeps saying yes to the right businesses when the economy stops cooperating.

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