👉 Independent reporting on the MENA tech and startup ecosystem. Stories like this exist because subscribers fund them. Subscribe now.
UAE consumer fintech Sav has raised $3.5 million in a pre-Series A round led by Abu Dhabi-based Phoenix Venture Partners, taking its total funding to approximately $6 million.
The round also included unnamed co-investors from the investor base of Phoenix Venture Partners Innovation Fund. Sav said the capital will primarily support its expansion into Saudi Arabia, alongside product development, AI infrastructure and customer acquisition across the GCC.
Founded by Purvi Munot and Mithil Ajmera, Sav started out as a much narrower savings product. When it raised a $750,000 pre-seed round from regional angel investors in March 2023, users could set savings goals, track their progress and earn rewards for reaching them. Sav said at the time that 20,000 users had created more than AED 20 million worth of savings goals.
The company has since widened into a broader personal-finance platform. Its MyMoney product connects users’ bank accounts and credit cards to provide a consolidated view of spending and net worth, while Sav now also offers prepaid cards, investments and gold. Its website lists credit as an upcoming product.
Sav operates from DIFC under a DFSA Category 4 licence covering activities including arranging and advising on investments, money services and credit. It is not a bank and does not itself hold customer deposits. Its prepaid card is currently issued by CBUAE-regulated NymCard.
Munot founded the company after a career spanning consumer banking and payments. She began at Citibank in Asia before joining Mastercard Advisors in the UAE in 2020, where she worked with financial institutions including clients in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. By June 2024, Sav said it had 50,000 monthly active users and was targeting $50 million in transactions over the following 12 to 15 months.
Sav says it had raised approximately $2.5 million before the latest round, but the company has not publicly broken out all of that financing. In June 2024, Munot told The National that Sav was closing a larger round with PIF-owned Sanabil Investments participating, without disclosing its size. The company also graduated from the seventh batch of the Sanabil 500 MENA Seed Accelerator that year.
The latest investment also comes as Sav pushes further into Saudi Arabia. That expansion is not starting entirely from scratch. The company recently announced a Visa partnership covering its card portfolio in both the UAE and Saudi Arabia, while Sav has said it has begun onboarding users from Saudi Arabia, India and the UK into some wealth products. Its own FAQ, however, still describes the broader Sav platform as currently available only in the UAE.
Phoenix Venture Partners is pitching the investment around a shift beyond payments and BNPL towards consumer wealth products.
“The next chapter of GCC fintech won’t be defined by payments,” founder and CEO Steve Khayat said. “It will be defined by what gets built on top of payment rails.”
Sav says it now generates revenue across interchange, wealth-management fees, commerce commissions and subscriptions, although it did not disclose revenue, transaction volume or current customer numbers alongside the new round
👉 Independent reporting on the MENA tech and startup ecosystem. Stories like this exist because subscribers fund them. Subscribe now.
