Abwab.ai raises 15 million riyals to automate enterprise lending: Speedinvest’s first investment in Saudi Arabia

Saudi fintech platform Abwab.ai closed an initial financing round of 15 million Saudi riyals (equivalent to 4 million dollars), led by European venture capital firm Speedinvest, with participation from Middle East Venture Partners (MEVP). This investment marks Speedinvest's first entry into the Saudi market, fully aimed at expanding the AI-powered infrastructure for lending to small and medium enterprises, which the platform has developed from Riyadh since its founding in 2023.

Credit operations carried out through the platform's technology have exceeded the 10 billion Saudi riyal threshold.This was done through more than 10 financial institutions within the Kingdom. The platform does not present itself as a direct lender to enterprises; instead, it operates as a provider of software and technology that enable banks, financing companies, and lenders to automate and efficiently scale lending to small and medium enterprises. The system covers the entire lending cycle, from client acquisition and digital registration, to request generation, credit assessment, fund disbursement, account and loan service management, and finally billing, collection, and repayment.

This infrastructure aims to address an operational and historical bottleneck that has limited the expansion of financing for emerging businesses, as financing requests from small companies required intensive manual reviews and complex management that made processing large volumes extremely costly for lenders. With more than 1.7 million small and medium enterprises in Saudi Arabia employing around 8.8 million people and contributing 22.9 percent of GDP in 2024, a clear financing gap emerges that Vision 2030 targets aim to close by raising the sector’s contribution to 35 percent, compared with a baseline of roughly 20 percent.

Bara’ Koshak, founder and CEO of the platform, explained that Saudi Arabia has made a major stride in expanding financing for small and medium enterprises, noting that the next phase centers on providing financial institutions with the appropriate infrastructure to sustain growth with operational efficiency. He added that the small-enterprise sector constitutes one of the main pillars of the kingdom’s commercial economy while large unfilled financing opportunities remain, regarding the European company’s investment as proof that technology built in Riyadh offers a solution to a global issue of accelerating credit access. This move coincides with the Saudi cabinet’s March decision to designate 2026 as the “Year of Artificial Intelligence,” aimed at strengthening the adoption of intelligent solutions and developing the data-driven economy.

Platform’s client network includes prominent financiersThese include Abdul Latif Jameel Finance, the Small and Medium Enterprise financing guarantee program Kafala, as well as Hala and Lendo. Attracting these entities reflects a shift in financing institutions’ behavior toward using external automation platforms capable of managing large financing portfolios with higher precision and minimal human intervention.

We see that this development transfers operational efficiency pressure directly to credit rooms and risk departments in regional financial institutions. Relying on manual credit studies is no longer viable given the speed of automated systems and their ability to reduce the cost of evaluating tiny financing files, opening the way for lenders to offer fast credit lines with profit margins previously deemed uneconomic. This shift requires credit officers and risk analysts to recalibrate their analytical tools, moving from reviewing paper financial statements to overseeing algorithmic scoring rules and automated collection models to ensure portfolio quality without slowing the pace of disbursements.