Dubai registered more than AED 100 billion in tenancy contracts last year. Almost all of it was paid the way it was paid a generation ago: an entire year of rent, settled with a handful of post-dated cheques. Keyper just raised $11 million to end that.
The UAE proptech closed a Series A led by Speedinvest, with NeoVentures — Mashreq’s corporate VC arm — co-leading. Middle East Venture Partners, Dubai Future District Fund, Property Finder, Arab National Bank, Ellington Properties, Dar Ventures and Abbey Road Investment Group all joined. It stacks on top of a previously announced $30 million Sukuk facility from Franklin Templeton.
What it actually does
Keyper’s core product, Rent Now Pay Monthly, converts a tenant’s annual rent obligation into monthly digital instalments while paying the landlord upfront. The company absorbs the timing mismatch. Around that sits property management software and embedded financial services, which is the part that distinguishes it from the rent-financing outfits that have tried this before.
The numbers are respectable rather than eye-watering. Keyper has financed north of $44 million in rent value since launch, $19 million of that in 2026 to date. It supports 10,500-plus properties worth over $6 billion, serves 4,000 landlords, and has crossed 100,000 app downloads. It has partnership agreements with the Dubai Land Department, Abu Dhabi’s ADRES, Property Finder, Visa and Mashreq.
The real thesis
The most revealing quote in the announcement comes from Khalid S. Alghamdi, CEO of ANB Capital, and it is not about tenants at all.
“This is not a rent app. It is the infrastructure layer for residential real estate, and whoever owns those rails will sit at the centre of how an entire market pays, borrows and invests against its homes.”
Alghamdi goes further, describing what happens once those recurring cash flows become digital and predictable: private credit, securitisation, new institutional investment products. In other words, the monthly rent app is the acquisition channel. The securitised rent-backed paper is the business.
That is a coherent thesis and also a familiar one. Turning consumer payment flows into tradeable instruments is precisely the manoeuvre that made buy-now-pay-later attractive to investors before the credit cycle turned. Rent is a stickier obligation than a sofa, which cuts both ways: harder to walk away from, but far more painful when a tenant does.
Speedinvest partner Rana Abdel Latif said what drew the firm in was execution rather than market size, citing co-founders Omar Abu Innab and Walid Sharaf for “addressing one of the region’s largest pain points: the disconnect between how tenants earn and how rent is paid.”
The new capital goes toward scaling the monthly rent platform, chasing institutional landlords and large residential portfolios, and adding financing and liquidity products for property owners. Keyper’s app is on the App Store and Google Play.
