Lean Technologies, a Riyadh-based financial technology platform, announced that it closed a $3.5 Million seed round from leading venture capital funds and sophisticated angel investors. The round was led by RAED Ventures with participation from Shorooq Partners, Outliers VC, Rocket Internet’s Global Founders Capital and Global Ventures. The company also received investments from notable MENA and US-based angel investors including Samih Toukan (Co-Founder of Souq.com and Maktoob.com) and Jake Seid (Former Partner and Managing Director at Lightspeed Ventures), among others.
Lean is a B2B platform that builds developer-friendly APIs to provide Fintechs with access to customer financial data and payment initiation capabilities. Lean achieves this by directly integrating with Financial Institutions and providing them with a state-of-the-art API integration layer to complement their existing infrastructure. The company’s technology provides Financial Institutions with full transparency, oversight and control over the data being shared by their customers, while also achieving full Open Banking compliance. As a result, Fintechs can integrate with a multitude of Financial Institutions in the region through a single platform – the Lean Universal API.
Lean is in the process of integrating and going live with several banks in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and will soon be expanding to the UAE, Kuwait and Egypt. The company aims to be operational in most countries in the Middle East by 2021, which goes hand-in-hand with its mission of enabling next generation of FinTech innovation in the region.
Lean aims to add value to all its key stakeholders, namely:
- Customers will gain more access and control over their financial data, which in turn would provide them with a variety of new financial applications and services while maintaining their existing banking relationships.
- FinTechs will gain universal access to their customers’ financial data, which is needed to provide innovative financial products and services.
- Banks will make new technologies available to their customers while gaining full transparency and control over the types of data being accessed by third parties.
- Regulators will maintain full oversight and control of the entire ecosystem’s operations, ensuring customer protection, data privacy and ecosystem stability.
Lean’s co-founders, Hisham Al-Falih, Aditya Sarkar, and Ashu Gupta are determined to support the growth of the fintech ecosystem in the region to drive greater financial inclusion and customer financial literacy.
Al-Falih added: “Customers stand to gain the most from sharing their data with new Fintech services. However, this should never come at the expense of their privacy and security. Lean’s core technologies ensure that customers can seamlessly and securely share their financial data with their favorite Fintech apps without ever compromising on their privacy or security.”
Omar A. Almajdouie, Founding Partner at Raed Ventures adds: “Financial inclusion is a great mission that needs the right infrastructure to thrive. Hisham, Aditya and Ashu built Lean Technologies to ensure that Fintech innovators have a seamless platform to build the greatest products for their communities in Middle East. The founders are determined and definitely capable to achieve this mission.”
Mahmoud Adi, Founding Partner at Shorooq Partners commented: “Lean is the missing piece for the Middle East FinTech ecosystem. The company will be the enabler of FinTech innovation in the region. This will accelerate growth in the Fintech ecosystem and create seamless consumer experiences so that we can all benefit from simpler financial lives. With data accessibility becoming increasingly pivotal in the space, we are truly excited about Lean’s journey ahead.”
Mohammed Almeshekah, Founding Partner of Outliers, concluded: “We are very proud to be backing Hisham, Aditya and Ashu, the founding team of Lean, as they build the digital infrastructure of the FinTech eco-system in MENA. Lean is strongly positioned to be the conduit of financial data and connectivity with a strong technical foundation built on trust and data security.”
