Saudi Arabia’s small and medium-sized businesses are becoming an increasingly important part of the Kingdom’s financial system, but serving them at scale presents a difficult problem for lenders: how do you assess thousands of businesses quickly, manage risk consistently, and extend more credit without making underwriting increasingly expensive?
Riyadh-based fintech Abwab.ai is building its business around that problem. The company has raised SAR 15 million ($4 million) in seed funding, led by Speedinvest with participation from Middle East Venture Partners (MEVP), to expand its AI-powered lending infrastructure for financial institutions across Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC.
The announcement was made by Co-founder and CEO Baraa Koshak at Money20/20 Middle East, marking a new phase for a company that is positioning itself not as another lender, but as the technology layer underneath lenders.
Building the Infrastructure Behind SME Credit
Abwab.ai was founded in 2023 by Baraa Koshak and Mohammad Hashem with a specific premise: closing the SME financing gap requires more than simply putting existing lending processes online.
Financial institutions still need to collect and interpret large amounts of information before deciding whether an SME should receive financing, how much it should receive and at what price. Abwab.ai’s platform is designed to bring those processes together, using data and AI to help financial institutions assess, originate and manage SME credit.
The distinction is important. Rather than lending from its own balance sheet, Abwab.ai provides infrastructure to banks and other financial institutions. Its technology can pull together information such as bank statements, VAT records, credit bureau data and other signals to support credit decisions.
The company’s broader platform spans credit decisioning, digital loan origination and portfolio monitoring, while also supporting embedded financing through channels such as payroll, e-commerce and point-of-sale platforms.
From Manual Underwriting to AI-Powered Credit Intelligence
The opportunity Abwab.ai is pursuing is closely connected to the complexity of SME lending.
A small business may have a viable operation, recurring revenues and a genuine need for working capital, yet assessing that business can require multiple sources of information and manual processes. For lenders, that creates a difficult economic equation: the cost and effort required to evaluate a smaller loan can become disproportionate to the value of the facility itself.
Abwab.ai is attempting to change that equation through what Koshak calls Agentic Credit Intelligence.
The company’s vision is to give lenders infrastructure that can help them assess businesses, manage risk and scale credit with greater speed and consistency. Rather than treating AI as simply a chatbot layered onto an existing workflow, Abwab.ai is building it into the underlying credit process.
That distinction could become increasingly important as financial institutions look for ways to expand SME lending without simply expanding their operational teams at the same rate.
A Platform Already Processing Billions
The latest funding announcement comes after significant activity through Abwab.ai’s platform.
According to the company, financial institutions have now processed more than SAR 10 billion in SME loans through Abwab.ai. The company also says its technology is being used by more than 13 financial institutions, with institutions including Saudi SME Bank, Abdul Latif Jameel Finance, Lendo, Hala Financing, Kafalah and Raqamyah listed among its customers and partners.
The scale matters because Abwab.ai’s proposition depends on becoming infrastructure rather than simply another point solution. The more credit decisions and lending workflows that run through the platform, the more central its technology can become to the institutions it serves.
Its platform is designed to support multiple stages of the lending lifecycle, from assessing a prospective borrower to originating a loan and subsequently monitoring the portfolio.
For Koshak, the company’s next chapter is therefore about going “deeper and broader”: deeper into the intelligence and collections capabilities it provides lenders, and broader in terms of the markets and institutions it can serve.
Why Saudi Arabia Is Becoming a Larger SME Credit Market
The timing of Abwab.ai’s expansion comes as SME lending in Saudi Arabia continues to grow.
According to the figures cited in the company’s funding announcement, Saudi SME lending reached SAR 489.2 billion in the first quarter of 2026, representing a 28% year-on-year increase. As lending volumes expand, the ability to evaluate and manage those loans efficiently becomes increasingly important for financial institutions.
This creates an infrastructure opportunity alongside the lending opportunity itself.
Banks and financing companies need to process more applications, evaluate more businesses and manage larger portfolios. Technology that can reduce repetitive manual work while helping credit teams make more consistent decisions could allow lenders to increase their capacity without relying entirely on proportional increases in headcount.
Abwab.ai is betting that AI can become part of that underlying infrastructure.
Its model also reflects a broader evolution in fintech. The first generation of fintech companies often focused on building consumer-facing financial products or lending directly to customers. A newer generation is increasingly focused on providing the infrastructure that allows regulated financial institutions to deliver those products more efficiently.
From Revolut and Banking to Saudi Fintech
The company’s founding team brings experience from both technology-led financial services and traditional banking.
Koshak previously worked on credit and data products at companies including Revolut, Hala and Mozn, while co-founder Mohammad Hashem spent more than a decade in banking, including experience at Oliver Wyman.
That combination is reflected in Abwab.ai’s positioning. The company is not approaching lending purely as a software problem or purely as a banking problem. It is attempting to bridge the two by giving financial institutions technology that can work within the realities of regulated credit operations.
For a market such as Saudi Arabia, where financial institutions are increasingly digitizing their operations and SME financing is expanding, that intersection creates a potentially significant technology layer.
The company’s challenge now is to prove that its infrastructure can deliver consistently across different lenders, portfolios and markets while maintaining the trust and risk controls required in financial services.
The Next Chapter Starts in Riyadh
The new capital will be used to expand Abwab.ai’s products, continue developing its Agentic Credit Intelligence and collections capabilities, grow its engineering team in Riyadh and enter additional GCC markets.
For Speedinvest, the investment also reflects growing interest in financial infrastructure across the region. MEVP’s participation adds another regional investor with experience across fintech and technology businesses.
But for Abwab.ai, the immediate objective appears more operational than symbolic: build the infrastructure that enables lenders to serve more SMEs.
The company has already positioned itself beneath the lending relationship rather than in front of it. If its technology can help financial institutions assess businesses faster, manage risk more effectively and scale credit without adding equivalent operational complexity, Abwab.ai could become part of the machinery through which the region’s next wave of SME financing is delivered.
As Koshak put it, the company’s next chapter is about going “deeper and broader.”
Lend More. Risk Less.
