Egypt-based fintech Zeal has raised $10 million in a new funding round, bringing its total funding to $14 million as the company looks to expand its technology across millions of payment terminals worldwide.
The company, founded in 2019 by Omar Ebeid and Belal Mohamed, is building technology that sits behind the point of sale, helping physical retailers turn ordinary card payments into opportunities for customer identification, loyalty and merchant intelligence. Unlike traditional loyalty platforms that often require separate apps or programmes, Zeal is designed to work through the payment infrastructure merchants already use.
Turning The Payment Terminal Into More Than A Checkout Device
For years, digital commerce has had an advantage over physical retail when it comes to understanding customers. Online merchants can connect a purchase to a customer profile, track behaviour and automatically trigger loyalty rewards, while a transaction at a physical store can often end with little useful information beyond the payment itself.
Zeal is targeting that gap by integrating its technology with existing payment terminals. Merchants can use the platform to introduce loyalty features such as points and stamps, capture customer information where appropriate, or connect their existing loyalty systems directly into the checkout journey.
The company’s broader proposition goes beyond loyalty. Zeal also provides merchant intelligence, giving payment providers and merchants greater visibility into transaction activity, payment declines and changes in trading behaviour.
A Four-Million-Terminal Opportunity
The scale of Zeal’s ambition is reflected in its existing pipeline. The company has signed contracts with payment acquirers globally covering more than four million card machines that it plans to activate over the next 24 months.
The new $10 million funding will support that rollout, deepen integrations across different payment environments and expand the tools available to merchants and payment providers. Zeal expects its coverage to increase further as it develops additional relationships across the payments ecosystem.
The company currently works with partners across the UK and Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, giving it an international footprint from which to build its next phase of growth.
Connecting Loyalty And Payments
Zeal’s thesis is relatively straightforward: the payment should not be the end of the customer relationship.
Its technology allows merchants to configure loyalty experiences around the transaction itself, while payment providers can gain additional insight into the businesses they serve. This creates a two-sided proposition in which the same infrastructure can help merchants understand their customers while giving acquirers and payment service providers additional tools to support their merchant networks.
“A card payment should be the start of a more useful customer relationship,” said Omar Ebeid, co-founder and CEO of Zeal. He added that the company has spent years working across fragmented payments infrastructure and that contracts covering more than four million card machines provide the foundation for its next stage of growth.
The Shift Toward Software-Enabled Payment Terminals
Payment terminals are increasingly becoming software platforms rather than devices used solely to accept cards. Modern terminal environments, particularly Android-based systems, can support additional business applications, creating new possibilities for loyalty, analytics and customer engagement directly at checkout.
The opportunity, however, is not simply about putting another application on a terminal. Payment infrastructure remains fragmented across manufacturers, operating systems, payment applications and acquiring platforms, meaning companies must navigate complex integrations before their technology can reach merchants at scale.
Zeal’s strategy is to work through payment acquirers and other industry partners, giving it a distribution route into existing terminal estates rather than requiring every merchant to adopt new hardware.
From $4 Million To A Global Rollout
The latest round follows Zeal’s $4 million funding in 2024, led by Raed Ventures and Cur8 Capital alongside strategic angel investors. The company has since continued expanding its payment integrations and building relationships with acquirers across multiple regions.
Zeal was also named Team of the Year at the UK FinTech Awards 2026, while co-founder and CTO Belal Mohamed received the Innovator of the Year award. The company is also part of the Scale Up by Endeavor programme, adding further support as it moves toward a significantly larger international deployment.
Mohamed described the challenge as connecting terminal journeys, loyalty and merchant insight across different payment environments so that partners can provide a more consistent proposition to their merchants.
The Next Stage Is Activation
For Zeal, the next two years will be less about proving that its technology can work and more about demonstrating how effectively it can scale across the infrastructure it has already lined up.
Activating more than four million payment terminals would give the company a substantial footprint across physical commerce, potentially putting loyalty and merchant intelligence directly inside the transactions businesses process every day. The real test will be whether Zeal can turn that distribution into sustained merchant adoption and a broader role within the global payments ecosystem.
