Tech
Egypt’s Khazna banks $16M for its financial super app and expansion into Saudi
A large portion of Egypt’s population lacks access to traditional banking, forcing many to rely on cash transactions and informal lending. Khazna, a fintech startup founded in 2019, is tackling this issue by offering financial services tailored for low- and middle-income workers. The company provides solutions like salary advances, digital payments, and microloans to help employees and contractors access much-needed financial services.
Khazna recently secured $16 million in pre-Series B funding, bringing its total funding to over $63 million. The investment will support its expansion plans as it prepares to apply for a digital banking license in Egypt and expand into Saudi Arabia.
When we covered the fintech in 2022, it had just raised $38 million pre-Series A with over 150,000 customers across its products. Today, Khazna has grown its user base to over 500,000 people; that number is half what it was targeting twice by the end of 2022, according to what Saleh shared at the time.
The company focuses on workers earning three times less than Egypt’s minimum wage, providing them with affordable financial tools. About 100,000 users receive their payroll through Khazna, allowing the company to integrate financial services such as loans and insurance directly into their payroll accounts.
For the remaining 400,000 users, Khazna offers lending services, helping gig workers and pensioners access credit. CEO Omar Saleh explained that the company initially focused on payroll-backed credit and pension lending, contributing to its break-even last month.
“What we did over the last two and half years was to focus on our core product, which is credit offering to payroll and pension recipients and also unsecured loans to gig workers,” co-founder and CEO Omar Saleh told TechCrunch on a call. “This is the most profitable and core product in our journey, and getting it right was very important because it has helped us to hit profitability.”
On the path to becoming a digital bank
Khazna provides other services like bill payments, buy now, pay later, medical insurance, and a rent-to-own product. But by embedding itself into both payroll and lending, it is strategically moving toward becoming a full-fledged digital bank for Egypt’s underserved communities.
But one thing is missing: unlike traditional banks, Khazna, like many fintechs in Egypt, doesn’t have access to customer deposits, making it expensive to fund loans. So far, Khazna has relied on wholesale debt financing in dollars (USD) and the Egyptian pound (EGP) to fund its lending operations.
To reduce borrowing costs and offer more affordable loans, Khazna is now working to obtain a deposit-taking license in Egypt. This license would allow the startup to accept customer deposits, allowing it to lower its cost of funds.
“The biggest game changer here is for us to get access to user deposits. There’s a huge opportunity for us to capture part of that market as well in a way that will make our cost of funding much more attractive than it is today, and ultimately, that would put us in a very differentiated position,” he remarked.
Khazna is targeting mid-2026 to secure the banking license from Egypt’s Central Bank, which laid out its regulatory framework for digital banks in July 2024.
But as the six-year-old fintech gets started with that process, it’s simultaneously setting sights on Saudi Arabia, where there is a growing demand for consumer finance solutions. Unlike BNPL players like Tabby and Tamara, which focus on short-term BNPL credit, Khazna hopes to differentiate itself with medium-term credit products like earned wage access (EWA), payroll-backed lending, and pension-based credit.
Expansion plans, including a not-so-imminent IPO
Another reason Khazna is prioritizing Saudi is its strong connection with Egypt, Saleh notes. With nearly three million Egyptians living in Saudi, the Egypt-Saudi remittance corridor is one of the world’s largest, presenting an opportunity to offer cross-border financial services, combining credit-led offerings with foreign exchange (FX) solutions.
Beyond market size and product fit, Saudi Arabia’s capital markets are also a driver in Khazna’s decision, according to Saleh. Tadawul is one of the region’s most liquid and retail-investor-driven stock exchanges, launching several IPOs over the past couple of years.
For that reason, Khazna plans to have 40-50% of its business coming from Saudi in the next four years, making it eligible for a public listing on Tadawul. For early-stage investors who have backed the company for four to five years, Saleh says this provides a clear path to a high-value exit.
Sure, Khazna will fund this expansion with the recently raised growth capital. However, the macroeconomic challenges in Egypt over the past two years had a hand in structuring this pre-Series B round.
Between 2022 and 2023, Egypt faced currency devaluations and economic instability, making fundraising more difficult for startups and ventures. The overall slowdown in deal flow reflected this, as investors took a cautious approach to Egyptian startups. But 2024 brought a major shift, with over $50 billion in foreign direct investment (FDI) flowing into Egypt following economic reforms and a more flexible exchange rate. As a result, investor confidence returned, bringing renewed interest from global and regional investors.
As such, Khazna welcomed participation from new and existing investors, including global investors like Quona and Speedinvest, as well as regional financial institutions and investment firms like SANAD Fund for MSME, anb Seed Fund (managed by anb Capital), Aljazira Capital (the investment arm of Bank Aljazira of Saudi Arabia), Tibas Ventures (the venture capital arm of İşbank of Turkey), Khwarizmi Ventures, Nclude (the fintech fund set up by Egypt’s largest national banks) and ICU Ventures.
Tech
Revolut eyes valuation of up to $200B in eventual IPO
British neobank Revolut seems to be eyeing a major valuation bump when it eventually goes public. The company is targeting a market cap between $150 billion and $200 billion in an initial public offering, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing anonymous investor sources.
The fintech giant, which secured a full banking license in the United Kingdom in March after years of waiting, was most recently valued at $75 billion, up from $45 billion in 2024, in a secondary share sale that made it one of Europe’s most valuable private tech companies.
Revolut’s co-founder and CEO, Nik Storonsky, last week said that the company’s IPO was at least “two years away,” according to Bloomberg.
According to PitchBook and the Financial Times, the company is working on another secondary share sale, scheduled for the second half of 2026, that would value it at more than $100 billion.
As of November 2025, the company had raised a total of $5.89 billion, according to PitchBook. Revolut reported revenue of $6 billion in the financial year ended December 31, 2025, up from $4 billion in 2024. The company’s net profit grew to $1.7 billion, up from $1 billion in 2024, and counted 68.3 million retail customers at the end of 2025.
Revolut declined to comment.
Founded in 2015, Revolut offers a range of services spanning multi-currency accounts, payment and transfer services, crypto products, insurance, and more. The neobank has been pouring truckloads of cash into expanding its operations internationally, and recently applied for a banking license in the United States.
Besides the U.K., Revolut has a banking license in the European Union, and it operates in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, and the U.S. Revolut launched operations in India last October, is about to start operating in Colombia this year, and has received a banking license in Mexico.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Amazon taps Sweden’s Einride for its electric big rigs
Einride is adding 75 of its electric heavy duty trucks to Amazon’s Relay freight network as part of a deal that gives the Swedish startup a toehold in the e-commerce giant’s operations. Einride will also provide charging infrastructure across five locations in the United States, under the agreement announced Tuesday.
Amazon isn’t buying or operating the electric trucks. Instead, Einride will own and manage (using its own Saga AI software) the trucks, which can be used by drivers in Amazon’s Relay freight network. Relay, launched in 2017, is an app that truck drivers can use to book hauling gigs with Amazon.
Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli, who took over as chief nearly a year ago, said working with Amazon is a powerful validation of the startup’s technology and strategic vision.
“By deploying our intelligent platform within one of the world’s most sophisticated logistics networks, we are accelerating growth, while continuing to build industry-leading operational expertise,” he said in a statement.
Einride has gained attention and investment for its two-pronged approach to freight. The company has developed and now operates a fleet of about 200 heavy-duty electric trucks for companies like Heineken, PepsiCo, and Carlsberg Sweden in Europe, North America, and the UAE. It has also developed autonomous pod-like trucks, which stand out for their cab-less design.
The agreement with Amazon doesn’t include the autonomous pods.
Einride has landed this agreement at a critical time: The startup is finalizing a merger with blank-check company Legato Merger Corp. and is expected to go public soon.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
While the agreement might not carry the same weight for Amazon, which has a market cap of $2.7 trillion, it does contribute to its low-carbon goals. Amazon has said it wants to reach net-zero carbon emissions across its operations by 2040.
“This rollout is an important step forward in addressing one of the toughest challenges we face in decarbonizing our transportation network — electrifying heavy-duty trucking,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We’re excited to continue to collaborate with Einride and learn from these operations as the trucks hit the road.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
YouTube expands its AI likeness detection technology to celebrities
YouTube is expanding its new “likeness detection” technology, which identifies AI-generated content, such as deepfakes, to people within the entertainment industry, the company announced on Tuesday.
The technology works similarly to YouTube’s existing Content ID system, which detects copyright-protected material in users’ uploaded videos, allowing rights owners to request removal or share in the video’s revenue.
Likeness detection does the same, but for simulated faces. The feature is meant to help protect creators and other public figures from having their identities used without their permission — a common problem for celebrities who find their likenesses have been used in scam advertisements.
The technology was first made available to a subset of YouTube creators in a pilot program last year before expanding more broadly to include politicians, government officials, and journalists this spring.
Now YouTube says the technology is being made available to those in the entertainment industry, including talent agencies, management companies, and the celebrities they represent. The company has support from major agencies like CAA, UTA, WME, and Untitled Management, which offered feedback on the new tool.
Use of the likeness detection tool does not require entertainers to have their own YouTube channels.
Instead, the feature scans for AI-generated content to detect visual matches of an enrolled participant’s face. Users can then choose to request removal of the video for privacy policy violations, submit a copyright removal request, or do nothing. YouTube notes that it won’t remove all content, as it permits parody and satire content under its rules.
In the future, the technology will support audio as well, the company says.
Related to this, YouTube has also been advocating for similar protections at a federal level, with its support for the NO FAKES Act in Washington, D.C. This would regulate the use of AI to create unauthorized re-creations of an individual’s voice and visual likeness.
The company hasn’t yet said how many removals of AI deepfakes have been managed by the tool so far, but noted in March that the amount of removals was still “very small.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
400K MagSafe power banks recalled after fatal fire, the 10th power bank recall in a year
The new Dyson Supersonic Travel is the cheapest Supersonic yet
