There is a particular irony in the fact that Abdulmajeed Alsukhan — the man who disrupted Saudi Arabia’s financial sector with a new generation of consumer credit products — first learned to understand that sector from the inside. Before founding Tamara, Alsukhan worked at the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA), where he developed a nuanced understanding of why millions of Saudi consumers were systematically excluded from the credit products that their counterparts in Europe and North America took for granted. That insight became the founding thesis of one of the GCC’s most successful fintech companies.
Three Founders, One Conviction
Tamara was founded in late 2020 by three Saudis: Alsukhan, Turki Bin Zarah, and Abdulmohsen Al Babtain. Each brought a different lens to the venture — Alsukhan the regulatory and macroeconomic perspective from his time at SAMA and Boston University, Bin Zarah the go-to-market and LinkedIn-era B2B sales discipline from his time at Kearney and PwC, and Al Babtain the technical architecture. Together, they built a BNPL product from the ground up during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic — a period when Saudi e-commerce was accelerating at a rate that no one had predicted and merchant demand for payment flexibility was exploding.
Tamara raised seed capital within months and grew to profitability faster than almost any comparable fintech globally. The company’s Series C round in 2023, led by SNB Capital and Sanabil Investments at a USD 1 billion valuation, made Tamara the first Saudi fintech startup to achieve unicorn status — a milestone that landed on the front pages of Saudi business media and in the offices of every sovereign wealth fund and family office that was watching Vision 2030’s economic diversification thesis play out in real time.
The Full Consumer Finance Licence: A Historical First
In March 2025, Tamara received a full consumer finance licence from SAMA — the first fintech company ever to receive this authorisation from the Saudi Central Bank. The licence transforms Tamara from a payment product into a regulated financial institution, enabling it to offer a broader range of lending, savings, and financial planning services. For Alsukhan, it was validation of a compliance-first approach that he had insisted on from day one, recognising that in Saudi Arabia, regulatory trust is the ultimate competitive moat.
Tamara now serves over 16 million registered customers and partners with more than 60,000 merchants, processing transactions across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait. The company’s Sharia-compliant architecture — which structures its BNPL products without interest charges, relying instead on merchant fees for revenue — has proven to be not just a regulatory necessity but a genuine consumer differentiator in a market where Islamic finance principles are deeply embedded in household financial decision-making.
What Alsukhan Represents for Saudi Entrepreneurship
Abdulmajeed Alsukhan’s story matters far beyond fintech. He represents the archetype that Vision 2030 is designed to create: a Saudi national who takes deep institutional knowledge — in his case, from SAMA — and channels it not into a stable government career but into a startup that reshapes the private sector. His success has inspired hundreds of young Saudis who previously might have defaulted to corporate or government careers to consider entrepreneurship as a viable and prestigious path.
At 1,300+ employees, Tamara is one of the largest Saudi-founded technology companies by headcount, with offices in Riyadh, Dubai, and a growing engineering presence in Berlin. For B2B operators targeting the Saudi consumer market, Tamara’s merchant network and customer data are increasingly an infrastructure layer — not just a payment option — in the Kingdom’s digital economy.
Also Read: Saudi Arabia’s Digital Riyal CBDC Pilot Expands to 20 Banks as Cross-Border Testing Begins | Saudi Vision 2030 Halfway Milestone: Key Non-Oil GDP Achievements and What Comes Next | MENA Economic Outlook 2026: Key Sectors, Investment Themes, and Growth Drivers for GCC Business
