Pomegra
Riyadh's erad secured $22 million in Series A equity led by MEVP as the four-year-old platform looks to push Shariah-compliant SME financing deeper into Gulf markets.
- erad raised $22M (SAR 78.75M) in a Series A led by MEVP, lifting total equity funding to $32M.
- Saudi operations grew 8x year-over-year; the platform has disbursed SAR 500M ($133M) in cumulative SME financing.
- New backers include SVC, 500 Global, S60 Ventures, ANB Capital, Conjunction Capital, and Araya Ventures.
Lead
erad, the Riyadh-based alternative financing platform for small and medium enterprises, closed a $22 million Series A round in September 2026 led by Middle East Venture Partners (MEVP). The deal brings total equity raised to $32 million and positions the four-year-old company to launch new credit products aimed at capital-intensive sectors across the GCC. Valuation was not disclosed.
What Does erad Actually Do?
erad provides Shariah-compliant financing to SMEs that traditional banks routinely pass over. The platform underwrites working capital, equipment, and supply-chain financing using proprietary credit models, and approves customers within an average of 48 hours - a contrast to the weeks-long timelines typical of regional commercial lenders. Since founding in 2022, it has received SAR 4 billion ($1 billion) in financing requests and converted SAR 500 million ($133 million) of those into actual disbursements.
The company operates across Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with Saudi Arabia generating the bulk of volume. That market grew eightfold year-over-year in the period leading up to this raise, a figure that clearly attracted institutional attention.
Why Is MEVP Backing an SME Lender Now?
The GCC carries an estimated $250 billion structural financing gap for small businesses - the difference between what SMEs need and what conventional banks will extend. Banks in the region have historically deprioritized sub-$1 million tickets because the risk-adjusted return on equity for small-business loans does not compete with corporate and sovereign lending. That gap did not appear recently; it has been documented for a decade. What changed is the regulatory and data environment.
Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 agenda explicitly targets SME participation in GDP. The Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) has made licensing and operating easier for fintech lenders. Open banking infrastructure, which allows platforms like erad to pull transaction data from commercial banks with SME consent, has improved underwriting accuracy enough to make the economics work at scale. MEVP has now placed a specific bet that erad's technology layer is differentiated enough to protect margins as the space attracts more capital.
The round added six new institutional names alongside five returning investors who increased their positions. That pattern - existing shareholders adding rather than reducing - removes one common warning sign in growth rounds.
Capital Structure and Product Direction
This equity raise is not erad's only recent funding event. In November 2025, the company closed a $125 million debt facility led by Jefferies to fund loan originations. The equity round serves a different purpose: product development, technology infrastructure, and hiring in commercial and risk functions.
The stated targets are industrial, logistics, and manufacturing businesses. These sectors carry larger ticket sizes and longer financing tenors than the working-capital products typical of early-stage SME lenders. Moving upmarket increases revenue per customer and extends the average loan duration, but it also increases exposure to cyclical sectors and requires more complex collateral and covenant structures. Whether erad's current credit model handles that transition smoothly is the central execution question for this deployment.
What Does the Competitive Picture Look Like?
Saudi fintech lending has attracted meaningful capital across multiple vintage years. Players including Lean Technologies, Tamam, and Lendo have addressed adjacent slices of the SME credit market. Regional banks have also accelerated their own digital SME products since 2023. erad's Shariah-compliant structure is a meaningful differentiator in a predominantly Muslim market, but it is not a moat on its own. Speed of approval, credit loss performance, and cost of origination are the metrics that will separate sustainable operators from funded experiments.
The company has not disclosed default rates or net interest margins. Those figures will matter considerably more than year-over-year origination growth as the portfolio seasons.
Outlook
erad heads into its Series A deployment with above-average momentum - an 8x growth rate in its primary market, a sizeable debt facility already in place, and a syndicate that includes both regional strategic capital (ANB Capital, SVC) and global allocators (500 Global). The $250 billion GCC SME financing gap is real and documented. The harder question is how much of that gap is addressable at acceptable credit quality, and at what speed. Expanding into industrial and logistics sectors will test that boundary. The next meaningful data point will be portfolio performance as the 2025 and 2026 vintages age.
