Yango Group has made its first investment in the Middle East and North Africa, with its venture arm Yango Ventures backing Dubai-based fintech Comfi AI in a pre-Series A funding round. The deal marks a milestone for the group’s investment strategy, which has so far focused on identifying infrastructure-style startups across emerging markets.
Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Dubai, Comfi AI builds embedded finance tools for small and medium-sized enterprises. Its product set spans business-to-business buy now, pay later, invoice discounting and dealer financing — categories that address the persistent working-capital squeeze facing SMEs in the region. The company says its platform integrates financing directly into transaction flows, reducing payment cycles from months to a single day.
Comfi AI’s traction figures suggest the proposition is landing. The startup serves more than 1,000 small and medium-sized enterprises across MENA, has processed over 15,000 invoices, and counts more than 4,000 finance professionals among its users. In a region where SME credit gaps are routinely cited as a brake on economic diversification, embedded financing that lives inside existing invoice and procurement workflows has obvious appeal — it reaches businesses that traditional lenders often score out.
Yango Ventures launched in 2025 with a fund capped at $20 million and a mandate to invest in early-stage companies across MENA, Africa, Latin America and South Asia. The fund’s thesis centers on infrastructure that supports business growth in emerging markets — logistics, fintech and SME services rather than consumer apps. Comfi AI fits that template: it is less a lending brand than a financial plumbing layer for B2B commerce.
The investment also says something about how Yango Group, best known regionally for its ride-hailing and delivery operations, sees its own evolution. The group has been steadily building out a portfolio of technology businesses, and a venture arm writing checks into regional fintech extends its footprint beyond operating companies into the broader startup ecosystem it operates within.
For Comfi AI, the capital arrives as B2B payments competition in the Gulf intensifies, with several players chasing the same SME financing opportunity. Fresh funding and a strategic backer with deep emerging-markets operating experience give the company room to scale its platform — and the round signals that MENA’s embedded-finance category is maturing fast enough to draw first-time regional investors off the sidelines.
