Alaan is a financial management platform based in the Middle East that recently announced a $48 million Series A funding round, led by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India & SEA), with other investors including the founder of 885Capital, Y Combinator, 468Capital, and Pioneer Fund. This is one of the largest funding rounds in the Middle East, highlighting the company's strong capabilities in the fintech sector.
The founder, Parthi Duraisamy, experienced the low acceptance of corporate credit cards in the Middle East while working as a consultant at McKinsey, which forced him to pay out of his own pocket during business trips and frequently submit expense reports. After co-founding Alaan with Karun Kurien, they aimed to solve this pain point and built a leading enterprise spending management platform in the Middle East.
Although Alaan raised $2.5 million in seed funding in mid-2021, the actual product launch was delayed by nearly a year due to the complexity of regulatory and banking partnerships. When entering the Saudi Arabian market, Alaan also faced approval challenges, and it wasn't until January 2023 that it could officially operate.
Alaan is not only the first platform in the Middle East to integrate Apple Pay into B2B services, but it also became the first to apply OpenAI technology to its services earlier this year. Although the initial chatbot function did not meet expectations, the company quickly adjusted its direction, focusing on using AI technology to improve back-end processing efficiency, such as receipt matching, expense reconciliation, and VAT extraction.
Since its launch in 2022, Alaan has processed over 2.5 million transactions, saving more than 1.5 million hours of manual work for over 1,500 finance teams. More encouragingly, the company has already achieved profitability, with revenue reaching $10 million, demonstrating strong market potential.
This funding will help Alaan accelerate its expansion in the Saudi market and strengthen hiring in sales, customer success, and compliance teams, while continuing to invest in AI-driven financial automation. Despite Ramp's rapid growth in the United States drawing investor attention, Duraisamy stated that the company's fundamentals are the key to attracting investment.