Sav raises $3.5 million to expand in Saudi Arabia and shift fintech from payments to AI-driven wealth management

Personal fintech platform Sav, based in the UAE, closed a pre-Series A financing round of $3.5 million, led by venture-capital fund manager Phoenix Venture Partners in Abu Dhabi, with participation from investors in its innovation fund pool. The round brings the platform’s total funding to about $6 million, up from roughly $2.5 million raised in earlier rounds, and will be used to direct liquidity toward expansion in the Saudi market, develop its smart infrastructure and accelerate user acquisition in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries.

Sav was founded in 2022 by Bervi Monot and Methil Ajemira, and operates under a Category 4 licence issued by the Dubai Financial Services Authority. The platform relies on a proprietary algorithmic architecture called SavCore, which combines artificial intelligence with open-finance infrastructure to enable individuals to aggregate and manage their multiple bank accounts in a unified environment, while automating core financial decisions such as saving, investing, buying gold, and managing credit, payments and e-commerce.

The investment round bets on a structural shift in the regional fintech landscape, moving the value centre from pure payment channels to building intelligent products on top of them.According to Steve Khayyat, founder and CEO of Phoenix Venture Partners, the next phase in the Gulf will not be defined by payment services, which have become the rails of the infrastructure, but by what is built on top of them, lending, insurance, wealth management and embedded finance. Co-founder and managing director Faris Al-Ubaid, drawing on his operational experience in the “buy now, pay later” sector, explains that the upcoming shift is toward helping consumers build wealth and automate its management rather than merely financing individual consumption.

The platform’s operations rely on a diversified revenue model that includes bank-exchange fee returns, wealth-management fees, trade commissions and recurring subscriptions. Bervi Monot, the platform’s CEO, notes that the current generation of professionals builds their financial assets across multiple country borders, while the traditional banking architecture remains fragmented and resets a user’s credit record with each geographic move, creating a need for a system that understands an individual’s complete financial picture and manages its flows automatically and independently.

This expansion into Saudi Arabia creates a direct competitive race for product managers and tech teams in banks and fintech firms across the Gulf and Egypt, as the attraction metric shifts from merely providing payment gateways and e-wallets to integrating AI engines capable of delivering automated financial advice and instant-saving decisions through open-finance interfaces. The shift puts compliance officers and data engineers in a position where cross-border banking data processing and unified credit-identity management for talent moving between regional markets become imperative.