The Dubai Foundation District Fund (DFDF) and Speedinvest led a $2 million pre-seed round for Kema, a UAE fintech platform founded by Michael Ghandour, a former co-founder of Mumzworld.com. With the digitization, automation, and streamlining of the invoice-to-cash process—also referred to as accounts receivable—Kema revolutionizes business-to-business (B2B) sales. Businesses can save time and money by taking advantage of automated and expedited cash flow.
With this investment, the company hopes to scale the solution throughout the United Arab Emirates, hire top talent to support its expansion and launch its SaaS platform targeted at the SME segment.
A 2021 UAE Central Bank report states that the volume of business payments made in the UAE surpassed $1.5 trillion, or almost 50% more than all retail payments made in the country. Nonetheless, compared to their more established counterparts, the financial operations of B2B SMEs have consistently been more analog, inefficient, and difficult.
“Having worked with B2B SMEs, a healthy and predictable cash flow cycle remains elusive for many. The problem is compounded by the combination of persistent payment delays, manual invoice workflows and follow-ups, multiple disconnected systems, and limited access to SME financing,” says Kema founder and CEO Michael Ghandour. “As a result, many businesses get stuck in a cycle of limited growth, increasing costs, and unproductive use of their most valuable resource, their employees’ time.”
Additionally, the effect builds up rapidly. A staggering $44 billion in working capital was found to be trapped across just 424 regional companies, according to a 2023 PWC report.
“We actually estimate that more than 500,000 B2B SMEs exist across MENA, suggesting that there is a staggering $400 billion in trapped working capital across their balance sheets,” said co-founder and CTO Akash Rao.
Historically, the B2B SME segment has always been underserved in terms of both capital and solutions. Kema wants to change that. “Our north star is simple: to accelerate cash flow for B2B SMEs using the latest technologies and without the integration headache that comes with it for our clients,” said Michael Ghandour.
More than AED 16.5 million ($4.5 million) in invoices have been facilitated by Kema since the private beta version launched in Q2 of 2023. “Incorporating learnings from working with our early customers, Kema can now slash the receivables process by up to 50 percent,” said Akash Rao. “We are also continuously adding a range of new features to suit many different types and sizes of businesses.”
With Kema, getting started is simple. Kema provides simple “no-code” plug-ins that integrate with popular accounting programs like Quickbooks and Xero. Kema allows businesses to generate and process invoices, automatically embed payment links and send reminders, receive payments via multiple digital channels, and receive real-time cash flow analytics in just a few minutes.
