UAE and Egypt startups sign deal to accelerate digital transformation in Middle East
- 30 Mar 2022
Staff Reporter, Gulf Today
UAE-based startup GrubTech has signed a partnership agreement with Egypt’s Paymob, the leading financial solution provider, to help fuel digital transformation in the Middle East.
The partnership will pave the way for thousands of restaurants, cafes and cloud kitchens in Egypt to modernise their operations and efficiently manage their payment systems.
Signed recently at Cafex, a leading B2B event for the restaurant and café industry, the partnership consolidates the strength of GrubTech’s leading edge, plug & play operating system with Paymob’s expertise in the digital payment space. It is expected to help digitise Egypt’s F&B ecosystem, making it easy for operators to be up and running with an all-in-one solution.
The GrubTech and Paymob collaboration features two, highly successful homegrown startups who share the same DNA and have helped fuel digital transformation in the Middle East. GrubTech has delivered key operational benefits for restaurant and cloud kitchen operators in 17 key markets around the world, only two years since it launched. Its entry into Egypt and partnership with Paymob will usher a new era of digital transformation in the industry.
“We’ve seen the chaos in the kitchen, and we fixed it using our all-in-one platform. Restaurants who used to wrestle with fragmented solutions and had to grapple with the burden of managing multiple vendors and disjointed data, now experience a massive shift in operational efficiencies and increase in sales. And that will only get better as we combine it with Paymob’s expertise in digital payment solutions,” said Mohamed Al Fayed, GrubTech’s Co-founder & CEO.
An integrated payment solution will benefit not just restaurateurs, café owners and cloud kitchen operators, but more importantly, consumers. A recent survey done by Visa shows that 85% of Egyptians are less likely to use cash for delivery payments. The shift is not only driven by convenience, as another study this time done by Mastercard says 3 out 4 Egyptian consumers prefer digital methods nowadays, because doing so helps them save money.
As one of Egypt’s leading fintech companies, Paymob has been empowering merchants across a wide range of industries to grow their business using multiple digital payment methods such as online payments, mobile wallets, and installments, among others. Established in 2015, the startup was one of the first to digitise the payment ecosystem in Egypt.
“We’re very excited to be partnering with Grubtech’s expertise, redefining the traditional payments reconciliation norms for the F&B sector by offering a bundled solution that seamlessly manage restaurants operations and payments from a single platform,” said Islam Shawky, Paymob’s Co-founder & CEO.
Cafes, restaurants, and cloud kitchens across Egypt that use GrubTech’s point of sale and restaurant management system will be automatically signed up with Paymob, a licensed payment provider in the country, allowing consumer card payments made at the GrubTech point of sale to be processed by Paymob.
GrubTech has raised over $18 million from reputable venture capital investors, highlighting continued investor confidence and growing market position. The partnership is strategically positioned to cover the entire country with a combined salesforce which should drive widespread adoption.