UAE B2B payments startup XSquare has raised an undisclosed pre-seed round led by Saudi Arabia’s Raed Ventures, with AngelSpark, 500 Global and Oraseya Capital. Founded in 2023 and built with Mastercard, it plans to use the money to grow across the Gulf and open in Saudi Arabia, the region’s largest market.

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For a finance team at a mid-sized Gulf company, paying suppliers can still feel stuck in an earlier era. Invoices arrive by email or WhatsApp, payments run through a handful of different providers, and someone spends the first ten days of every month matching one against the other by hand. XSquare, a young Emirati fintech felt that this everyday mess signals towards a business that needs building and it has just raised fresh money to carry it into Saudi Arabia.

On 20 August 2026, the UAE-based company said it had closed an undisclosed pre-seed round led by Raed Ventures, a Saudi venture firm, with participation from AngelSpark, 500 Global, and Oraseya Capital, a Dubai government-backed fund. The size of the cheque was not shared, which is normal this early. XSquare says it will use the money to widen its payment and banking partnerships, hire across its engineering and commercial teams, and begin operating in Saudi Arabia.

Founded in 2023 by Tanvir Shah and Ashwin Shenoy, XSquare describes itself as a payment orchestration layer built purely for business-to-business payments. In plainer terms, it is trying to run invoicing, card and bank payments, and reconciliation on a single system, so a company can collect, pay and match its books in one place rather than stitching together a separate tool for each provider. It is currently live in the UAE and Qatar, launching with rails from Telr, Geidea, VaultsPay, Spare, and Tess Payments.

XSquare has partners with Mastercard to bring B2B payments product to market, letting companies pay suppliers and vendors with cards that settle straight into bank accounts, and pulling business spending that has usually sat outside the card system onto commercial cards. The company says it is rolling this out with government and large corporate clients.

“B2B payments in this region have been underserved for too long, forced onto tools built for consumer markets. We are building the payment infrastructure that regional businesses need: card and bank rails, orchestration and reconciliation, all in one place. Having Raed Ventures, AngelSpark, 500 Global and Oraseya Capital participate in this round is a strong endorsement of that vision and of the traction we are seeing with Banks, Government entities and large Corporates.” said Tanvir Shah, XSquare’s Co-founder and Chief Executive.

Why Saudi Arabia Is the Prize

For a Gulf fintech, the kingdom is the biggest prize in the region. It has the largest economy and population in the Arab world and its Vision 2030 program has spent years pushing businesses and consumers toward digital payments. It is also one of the harder markets to crack, with its own regulator, licensing regime, and well-funded local rivals. XSquare’s own model says it deploys market by market rather than running one cross-border product, so entering Saudi Arabia means setting up a local operation.

That is part of why having Raed Ventures lead the round matters as much as the cash. Raed is a Saudi firm, and a local lead investor tends to bring the introductions and market knowledge a newcomer needs.

“The B2B payments opportunity across the GCC is large and still largely untapped, and XSquare is one of the few teams with both the banking depth and technical execution to capture it,” said Saed Nashef, Founding Partner at Raed Ventures.

A Small Round in a Crowded Race

The Gulf’s payments space is crowded, with well-capitalised fintechs and banks chasing the same corporate flows. Keeping in mind, XSquare has a pre-seed round of undisclosed size for a three-year-old company that has so far expanded to a single market beyond home, and its claim is to run the region’s first B2B-only payment orchestration. XSquare’s earlier backing this year from AngelSpark was also undisclosed, so the figures behind the story stay thin by design.

Even so, the logic is sound and the founder is not new to the problem. Tanvir Shah spent two decades inside GCC banks and payments businesses before starting XSquare, and the gap he is chasing is real. B2B payments in the Gulf genuinely have lagged the region’s polished consumer apps, and Saudi Arabia is where the volume lives. If XSquare can turn a neat idea and a Mastercard deal into real traction inside the kingdom, an undisclosed pre-seed today may end up looking like the easy part.