Dubai-based buy now, pay later startup Tabby raised $150M in debt from Atalaya Capital and Partners for Growth, bringing its total funding to $275M
Leen Al-Rashdan / Bloomberg :
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-2022 Tabby had already closed two equity rounds in about a year — a $50M Series B at a $300M valuation and a Sequoia Capital India-led $54M extension — making it the Middle East's largest BNPL provider. This $150M debt line from Atalaya Capital and Partners for Growth is a different kind of raise: borrowing against a lending book rather than selling more equity.
The later coverage confirms the arc this debt round sits inside: a $200M Series D at a $1.5B valuation with the CEO claiming Gulf profitability, then a $160M Series E at $3.3B and a secondary share sale at $4.5B with IPO talk attached.
First-order effects
- Tabby gets $150M of lendable capital for its Gulf consumer-credit book without further diluting Hosam Arab and existing shareholders, taking total funding to $275M.
- Atalaya Capital and Partners for Growth gain direct exposure to Middle East consumer installment lending, a market their structured-debt funds had not been documented in within this coverage.
Second-order effects
- Saudi rival Tamara, whose $110M Series A was led by Checkout.com, now competes against a better-capitalized player and faces pressure to line up its own debt facility to match Tabby's lending capacity.
- Debt funding lets Tabby underwrite more merchants and shoppers per equity dollar, sharpening the growth-per-dollar story its later Series D and E investors ultimately paid up for.
Third-order effects
- The pattern here — equity rounds layered with structured debt as a BNPL lender scales — points to debt facilities becoming standard infrastructure for Gulf fintech balance sheets, not an occasional add-on.
- A debt-funded, profitability-claiming lender is a different IPO candidate than a pure venture burn story; the eventual $4.5B secondary sale and IPO positioning suggest this financing mix helped make Tabby legible to public-market buyers.
The trend: Gulf buy-now-pay-later is maturing from equity-funded startups into debt-financed lenders building public-listing-ready balance sheets.