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Yuno, a Colombia-founded payment orchestration platform, has raised a $45 million Series B led by Global PayTech Ventures, the company announced on 12 August 2026. The round is notable for this market for a reason unrelated to where Yuno is headquartered: the company already runs live payment infrastructure across the UAE and the rest of the Gulf through a partnership signed earlier this year.
The round, and who’s actually backing it
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| Amount raised | $45 million, Series B |
| Lead investor | Global PayTech Ventures |
| Other investors | Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, QuantumLight Capital, Monashees, Kaszek, Rasmal Ventures, GrowthX Capital, Further Ventures, among others |
| Founded | 2022, in Colombia, by Juan Pablo Ortega (CEO, former Rappi co-founder) |
| What it does | AI-native payment orchestration connecting enterprise merchants to 1,000+ local payment methods and 460+ integrations across 190 countries via a single API |
| Named customers | McDonald’s, NetEase Games, GoFundMe, inDrive, Rappi |
Two of the participating investors carry direct Gulf ties worth noting on their own: Rasmal Ventures is backed by the Qatar Investment Authority, and Further Ventures is backed by Abu Dhabi sovereign capital. That’s Gulf sovereign-linked money sitting inside a ‘global’ Series B before any formal regional headquarters announcement, a detail easy to miss if you only read the round as a Latin American fintech story.
The UAE piece: a live partnership, not a future promise
Unlike most funding rounds covered under UAE startup funding, Yuno’s Gulf presence didn’t start with this raise. In February 2026, Yuno partnered with Tap Payments, one of MENA’s largest licensed payment institutions, serving more than 120,000 businesses including TikTok, Talabat and Keeta. The partnership gives Yuno’s enterprise merchants access to Tap’s regulated infrastructure across all six GCC states, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman, including local rails like Mada in Saudi Arabia, KNET in Kuwait and NAPS in Qatar.
“By combining Tap’s regional infrastructure with Yuno’s orchestration layer, enterprises can scale across the region with clarity, control, and confidence,” said Tap Payments CEO Ali Abulhasan.
Yuno CEO Juan Pablo Ortega called it “a turnkey solution to expand across the GCC with unprecedented speed and compliance certainty.”
Yuno has also built out its own direct regional credentials since: its Saudi arm received Payment Technical Service Provider certification from the Saudi Central Bank in April 2026, and the company separately partnered with BNPL provider Tabby, reaching more than 25 million shoppers across Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Why it matters
For UAE enterprise merchants and payment infrastructure
The practical upshot for a UAE-based enterprise merchant is that Yuno was never a “coming soon” story here. Through Tap Payments, UAE-facing checkout flows can already route through Yuno’s orchestration layer today, with this Series B funding faster product development and AI-driven features (fraud detection, authorisation-rate optimisation) rather than a first market entry. Yuno says it recovered more than $5 billion in failed transactions and lifted authorisation rates by roughly 5% for its merchants over the past year, figures that now apply to whatever volume already runs through the UAE via Tap.
For how global fintech funding actually reaches the UAE
This is a useful pattern to name plainly: a ‘UAE startup funding’ search increasingly surfaces rounds raised by companies that were never UAE-founded, but that reach the market through a regional partner’s licensed rails rather than their own local entity. Tracking who actually holds the licence, Tap Payments here, not Yuno, matters more for understanding real UAE market access than tracking headline funding amounts alone.
What’s next
Whether Yuno moves from a rails partnership to its own licensed regional presence in the UAE or elsewhere in the GCC is the more concrete thing worth watching next.
FAQs
Is Yuno a UAE company?
No. Yuno was founded in Colombia in 2022. It reaches UAE and wider GCC merchants through a partnership with Tap Payments, a MENA-licensed payment institution, rather than through its own UAE entity.
What does the Yuno x Tap Payments partnership actually give UAE merchants?
Access to Tap’s regulated, licensed payment infrastructure across the UAE (and the other five GCC states) through Yuno’s single orchestration API, rather than needing separate integrations for each local payment method or country.
What will Yuno do with its new $45 million Series B?
The company says the funding will extend its AI-native transaction infrastructure and support customer demand across emerging trade corridors, including the Gulf, though it hasn’t disclosed a specific GCC-only budget breakdown.
Does this funding round mean Yuno is opening a UAE office?
Not confirmed. Some coverage has suggested Doha, Qatar as a possible regional hub, but this piece could not independently verify a confirmed headquarters decision from a source it directly checked.
Who are Yuno’s Gulf-linked investors in this round?
Rasmal Ventures, backed by the Qatar Investment Authority, and Further Ventures, backed by Abu Dhabi sovereign capital, both participated in the Series B alongside global investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global.
Editor’s Take: Gulf sovereign capital, via Rasmal Ventures and Further Ventures, is already inside this round, and Yuno’s actual UAE market access has existed since February through Tap Payments’ licence, months before this funding news. Most ‘global fintech raises $X million’ stories get covered in the UAE market purely because a company says it plans to expand here eventually. This one inverts that, the UAE access was already real, and the funding is catching up to infrastructure that was quietly live first.