In a pre-Series A funding round, Pluto, the top corporate card and expense management platform in the United Arab Emirates, successfully raised $4.1 million. Only a few weeks have passed since co-founder Mohammed Ridwan declared that Pluto had overseen the company’s expenditures, which had surpassed AED 1 billion.
Prominent early-stage venture capital firm Rhino Ventures, Born Capital, which only invests in CFO-focused technologies, Goanna Capital, which has invested in Ramp, Rippling, and Figma, Evolution VC, which has backed unicorns like Brex, Ramp, and Freshbooks, Freesearch VC, and Tiferes VC, were among the new and existing investors who led the round.
“Pluto is delivering a winning product to a market underserved by modern procure-to-pay solutions. Their vision to be the future back office for enterprises is consistent with an AI-augmented world. Having demonstrated a speed of execution and quality of product on par with global leaders in the space, we feel privileged to partner with the team at Pluto,” says Rhino Ventures.
Former Silicon Valley leaders have backed Pluto in the past, including investment leaders Ramp, Soma Capital, and Graph Ventures, as well as angel investors Willliam Hockey, a co-founder of Plaid, Packy McCormick of Not Boring, and former executives from Cash App, Shopify, Amazon, and other companies.
Mohammed Ridwan, Mohammed Aziz, and Nayeem Zen founded Pluto in 2021. The platform combines petty cash management, AI-powered corporate cards with an unrivaled cashback program, dynamic budget tracking, procurement, invoice, and vendor management into a single, user-friendly product. With partnerships with top firms like Property Finder, Knight Frank, Tamara, Petrochem, and others, Pluto has quickly expanded throughout SMEs and businesses in the United Arab Emirates since its founding.
With the recent launch of Pluto Connect as a flagship solution, Pluto presents a new business model that enables financial institutions and banks to easily integrate its spend management and corporate card features into their own products, enabling banks to update their commercial banking capabilities. Currently, Pluto powers over 30,000 SMEs through Pluto Connect, which is connected to one of the biggest banks globally. Pluto will intensify its bank-integrated strategy with this new funding in order to create more partnerships worldwide, including in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar, and to further develop its AI-powered capabilities in order to provide SMEs with a fully automated platform for managing accounts payable.
“In 2025, SMEs expect way more from their banks than just using them as depository accounts. Value added services are a key strategy for most banks in the region. Partnering with banks and financial institutions allows Pluto to bring our world-class solutions to more customers globally and allows such institutions to provide a world-class experience back to their customers,” said Mohammed Aziz, CEO of Pluto.
As the only platform catering to banks in the United Arab Emirates, Pluto distinguishes itself by combining all essential components of financial management—from automated invoice management to modern procurement management to AI-driven spend control—into a single, cohesive solution. By doing away with shared corporate cards, manual data entry, and protracted reconciliation times, Pluto enables banks and other financial institutions to provide a smooth, value-added experience that strengthens client relationships, expedites processes, and generates significant financial efficiency for SMEs.
An important advancement in Pluto’s growth strategy is this raise. Pluto’s partnership with neoleap by Al Rajhi Bank to expand operations into Saudi Arabia and Pluto’s strategic partnership with Mastercard to further fuel B2B payment solutions across the GCC are among the recent accomplishments discussed in the news, which also includes being ranked #1 in EMEA for Procure to Pay Solutions and recognized as a Top 10 provider globally in both Enterprise and SMB Expense Management by G2.
