In 2019, Hosam Arab was sitting in a modest Dubai apartment with a whiteboard, a co-founder, and a single conviction: that the GCC’s hundreds of millions of underserved consumers deserved better financial tools than the credit card companies were willing to offer them. Six years later, tabby — the buy-now-pay-later platform he co-founded — is valued at USD 4.5 billion, processes over USD 10 billion in annualised transactions, and is widely expected to list on a regional stock exchange in 2026, making it one of the most eagerly anticipated IPOs in MENA’s history.
From McKinsey to the Startup Desert
Hosam Arab’s journey to fintech founder was not a straight line. Born in Egypt and raised across the Arab world, he studied engineering before pivoting to business strategy — a trajectory that brought him through positions at McKinsey, Careem (the GCC’s first tech unicorn, later acquired by Uber), and Souq.com (acquired by Amazon in 2017 for USD 580 million). He was, in other words, present at the founding of almost every significant chapter in the GCC’s digital economy story before writing his own.
“The GCC markets have one of the highest smartphone penetration rates in the world, one of the youngest consumer populations, and historically one of the most underbanked credit environments,” Arab has explained in interviews. “When we looked at the data, it was obvious that BNPL was going to be ten times larger here than in any other market, because the gap between consumer appetite and available credit products was so enormous.”
Building tabby in a Boom and a Pandemic
tabby launched in 2019 and immediately faced its first existential test: a global pandemic that shuttered physical retail six months after its debut. Rather than retreating, Arab and his team pivoted hard into online retail — a move that proved prescient as e-commerce in the GCC accelerated dramatically through 2020 and 2021. By 2021, tabby had processed its first billion US dollars in payment volume. By 2023, it was processing that same volume every few weeks.
The company’s Series E round in early 2025 — USD 160 million at a USD 3.3 billion valuation led by Blue Pool Capital and Hassana Investment Company — was followed by a secondary transaction later that year that pushed the implied valuation to USD 4.5 billion. tabby now serves over 15 million users across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait, and partners with more than 30,000 merchants — from global brands like IKEA and SHEIN to thousands of local SMEs that use tabby’s installment infrastructure to compete with larger retailers on payment flexibility.
Beyond BNPL: tabby’s Financial Services Ambition
Arab is deliberate about one thing: tabby is not building just a payment company. The long-term thesis — visible in tabby’s 2025 launch of a savings product and its financial services super-app roadmap — is to become the trusted financial home for the GCC’s digital-native consumer generation. In a region where traditional banks are perceived as inaccessible or bureaucratic by young users, tabby’s mobile-first, Arabic-first, and Sharia-compliant architecture gives it a structural advantage that pure technology alone cannot replicate.
As tabby moves toward its planned 2026 IPO, Arab represents something the GCC’s business community has long searched for: proof that a regionally born, regionally focused startup can compete on global metrics without needing to relocate to Silicon Valley to achieve scale. For every B2B operator, merchant, and entrepreneur in the Gulf watching where the region’s digital economy goes next, Hosam Arab’s trajectory is the most important story to follow.
Also Read: Reem Asaad: The Saudi Woman Who Changed Labour Law with Facebook — Then Built a Tech Leadership Career | Nayla Al Khaja: The UAE’s First Female Filmmaker Who Put Emirati Cinema on Netflix | Jad Antoun: Fixing the Most Painful Transaction in the UAE — One Mortgage at a Time
