Press release:
Vrtx, a Riyadh-based embedded finance platform, today announced it has raised $3.6 million in Pre-Seed funding.
Vrtx was founded by Mishal Bin Slimah and Omar Shaaban, who formerly worked together at Tweeq, one of Saudi Arabia’s early digital financial platforms that was acquired by Tabby. Their experience building financial products firsthand showed them how difficult it is to bring simple financial services to market, requiring technology, operations, compliance and security to be built in parallel.
They founded Vrtx to simplify that process. Vrtx aims to bring together the infrastructure and operational capabilities required to embed financial services, including wallets, payouts, card issuing, transfers, and transaction processing.
Vrtx has received In-Principle Approval (IPA) from the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) for an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) licence, an important step toward enabling these services within the Kingdom’s regulatory framework.
Instead of spending significant time building financial systems, connecting payment flows, and managing operations from scratch, Vrtx is aiming to give companies a clear path to activate financial solutions faster and with less complexity.
With a secure test environment, guided workflows and an operational layer built for scale, Vrtx aspires to help companies move from idea to live operations in less time, while maintaining stronger control over balances, transactions and financial rules without unnecessary technical or operational overhead.
The round was backed by SCV by Standard Chartered, Sadu Capital, BYLD, Suhail Ventures, F6 Ventures, TAZ Investment and Palm Ventures.
Mishal Bin Slimah, Co-Founder and CEO of Vrtx, described the company’s vision as a hub of fintech capabilities that any company can pick from and build on, based on what its product actually needs.
“Building fintech products today is hard. Companies with a clear idea and real demand spend years assembling core infrastructure, operations and security before they serve a single customer. Our goal is to make fintech capability a standard building block for any business, with Vrtx as the destination for the fintech capability they need,” Mishal Bin Slimah said.
SC Ventures by Standard Chartered Country Lead – Saudi Arabia, Gabriel Heredia, commented: “This investment reflects our conviction in the growth of embedded finance in Saudi Arabia and the increasing role that financial infrastructure will play in enabling businesses across the Kingdom. Vrtx combines strong market understanding with the technology and capabilities needed to address this opportunity. We are pleased to support the team as they scale their platform and contribute to the continued development of the Kingdom’s fintech ecosystem.”
Youcef Oudjidane, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, BYLD, commented: “Embedded finance has the potential to become an important layer of economic infrastructure, allowing financial services to be integrated into the businesses people use every day. But for that potential to be realised at scale, innovation and regulation need to develop hand in hand. What gave us conviction in Mishal was that he understood this from the outset and built Vrtx with regulatory compliance at its core.”