XSquare closes pre-seed round led by Raed Ventures to expand into Saudi Arabia and orchestrate corporate payments

UAE-based enterprise fintech and corporate payments startup XSquare has announced the closing of a undisclosed pre-seed funding round led by Raed Ventures, with participation from AngelSpark, 500 Global, and Oraseya Capital, an investment fund backed by the Government of Dubai. The round follows an earlier undisclosed pre-seed investment from AngelSpark this year, with the fresh capital directed toward regional expansion, strengthening banking integration partnerships, and growing its engineering and commercial teams.

Founded in 2023 by Tanveer Shah and Ashwin Shenoy, XSquare develops an integrated platform for corporate payments and B2B transactions, describing its infrastructure as the region's first orchestration layer built exclusively for corporate transactions.The platform consolidates multiple payment rails behind a single API, enabling enterprises and companies to collect funds, disburse payments, and reconcile accounts across various providers without manual integration between disparate systems, offering a unified operating environment tailored to corporate spending requirements.

The platform launches with direct integrations across several payment rails, including Telr, Geidea, VaultsPay, Spare, and Tiss Payments, with plans to add further partners later.Through its partnership with Mastercard, the company is working to roll out corporate payment solutions across the regional market, a mechanism allowing supplier and merchant disbursements via cards with direct settlement into bank accounts. The platform aims to deploy this program in collaboration with prominent government entities and large corporations to leverage commercial card economics for business expenses that have traditionally remained outside card payment networks.

The company maintains an operational presence in the UAE and Qatar, where its launch marked its first expansion beyond its domestic market from a base in the Qatar Financial Centre, alongside strategic partnerships with leading banks and licensed payment partners in Doha.This operational step in Qatar lays the groundwork for expanding the company's footprint across the Gulf Cooperation Council, paving the way to launch operations in Saudi Arabia and expand banking and technical partnerships across regional markets.

Tanveer Shah, co-founder and CEO of XSquare, explained that corporate payments in the region have long lacked adequate infrastructure, forcing companies to rely on tools built for consumer markets. He noted that the company is building an infrastructure layer that unifies card rails, banking channels, and reconciliation workflows into a single environment, adding that Raed Ventures' leadership of the round and investor participation provide strong backing for this vision and for the tangible demand from banks, government entities, and large enterprises. For his part, Saed Nashef, co-founding partner at Raed Ventures, stated that the opportunity in Gulf B2B payments is vast and largely untapped, emphasizing that the team's banking background, technical execution capability, and progress in the Mastercard program gave the fund the confidence to lead the round and back the company's regional expansion.