Riyadh-based Vrtx has raised $3.6 million to build embedded finance infrastructure for businesses across Saudi Arabia. This is not just another fintech app, but it is an opportunity to create financial capabilities modular enough to be built into almost any digital business.

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The next phase of fintech in Saudi Arabia is going to be impactful and all developments maybe behind the scenes. As digital payments, open banking, and fintech adoption accelerate across Saudi Arabia, companies want to offer financial services without building an entire banking or payments stack themselves. Vrtx, a Riyadh-based startup, is trying to solve this problem.

The embedded-finance startup has raised $3.6 million in a pre-seed funding round backed by SC Ventures by Standard Chartered, Sadu Capital, BYLD, Suhail Ventures, F6 Ventures, TAZ Investment and Palm Ventures.

Founded in 2025 by Mishal Bin Slimah and Omar Shaaban, Vrtx is developing infrastructure that enables businesses to add digital wallets, payouts, card issuing, transfers and transaction processing directly into their own products. Wamda

It is a simple proposition, a company should not have to become a fintech company in order to offer fintech products. Embedded finance changes where financial services appear. Instead of customers opening a separate banking or payments app, financial functionality can be integrated directly into the platform they are already using. For example, a marketplace can provide seller wallets, a logistic company could offer payment accounts to drivers and a retailer could add stored value balances or instant payouts and a software platform could issue cards to business customers. The customer may not need to interact with a traditional fintech platform at all.

Vrtx wants to provide the technology and operational infrastructre underneath those experiences. Its platform combines capabilities such as wallets, card issuance, transaction processing, payouts and transfers with a secure testing environment, developer tools and operational controls. Wamda

For companies, the main attraction is time. Building infrastruture internally requires integration with payment systems, security architecture, operational teams and regulatory processes before a product even reaches a customer.

The founders, Bin Slimah and Shaaban, worked together at Tweeq, one of Saudi Arabia's early digital financial platforms, before Tabby acquired it. That experience has been central to forming Vrtx. They argue that even simple financial products can take years to launch because companies build technology, operations, compliance and security simultaneously.

Therefore instead of asking all companies to build those foundations independently, Vrtx is aiming for financial capabilities to be added like a modular software components.

Bin Slimah describes the ambition as creating a hub where businesses can select the fintech capabilities their product requires rather than building the underlying infrastructure themselves. Wamda

Vrtx has received in-principle approval from the Saudi Central Bank for an Electronic Money Institution licence, a step towards operating its services within the Kingdom’s regulated payments framework.

An embedded-finance company can make financial functionality easier to integrate, but the underlying movement and storage of money still requires regulatory oversight.

The model resembles what cloud computing did for software infrastructure. However, VRTX is still at a very early stage, and an in-principle approval is not the same as a final license or proof that it can scale. Although the funding of $3.6 million proves that the investors are interested to explore the next layer of fintech in Saudi Arabia.

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