Tabby and Tamara's 45 Million Lesson: A Round Prices the Company, It Never Scores the Marketing

Forty five million users, fifty four million people

On 14 September 2026, one day before this article was written, Tabby announced it had raised 233 million dollars at a valuation of 6.5 billion dollars. The approved plan this series is built from lists the company at 4.5 billion. The plan was not careless. It was written against the most recent figure available, and that figure aged out overnight.

That is the smallest of the problems with the scoreboard this category is scored on.

Tabby now reports more than 25 million registered users. Tamara reports more than 20 million customers. Both operate in some combination of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain, and those four countries together hold roughly 54 million people, counting every infant, every visitor on a residence permit and every person who has never owned a smartphone.

So two companies in one category claim registered relationships with about 83 per cent of the human beings in their own markets. Nobody has lied. The number is doing something other than what the sentence implies, and finding out what is the point of this episode.

This is also where the series changes gear. Episodes 1 to 15 dissected campaigns, where the famous number was usually a sales lift or a share price. The Gulf run is different, because Gulf companies are reported on through funding rounds. A valuation, a user count, a merchant count, a transaction volume, a debt facility. Every one of those is either a price somebody paid for a share of the company or a count of accounts opened. Not one of them is a marketing result, and the case studies that treat them as marketing results are the reason a Riyadh operator reads this story and takes the wrong lesson out of it.

What was already in place before either app existed

The standard telling is that Tabby and Tamara found an underserved market and marketed their way into it. The market was real. It was also prepared, and by parties other than these two companies.

Start with the credit gap, which is the premise of the whole category. Saudi credit card penetration sits around 27.7 per cent and is forecast to rise by about two percentage points by 2029. That is genuinely low against comparable economies, and it is the honest half of the story. The less quoted half is that the gap is not closing and was never expected to, which means it is a standing condition of the market rather than a window somebody sprinted through.

Underneath it sits payment infrastructure almost nobody credits. Saudi Arabia runs a near universal domestic debit network in mada, and SAMA reported that electronic payments accounted for 85 per cent of retail transactions in 2025. A buy now pay later product needs a population that already pays digitally, already carries a bank account, and is already reachable at a checkout. All three existed before Tabby did.

Then the demographics, which are the part every deck leads with and the part that required nothing of either company: a young population, very high smartphone penetration, and a growing e-commerce market.

And finally the regulator. SAMA built a licensing framework for buy now pay later and began authorising companies under it, and at one point the authorised list was five names long. That framework is the single most consequential thing that happened to this category, and it is not a marketing event. It converted an open field that anyone could enter into a short list that the central bank controls entry to.

That is the machine. A structural credit gap, a national payments rail, a young connected population, and a regulator that turned a licence into a moat. The two companies did not build any of it. They were standing on it when the money arrived.

The decision that was not positioning

The plan's own angle on this episode is that category races are won on positioning and capital rather than feature lists. The capital half is right and the positioning half does not survive contact with what the two companies actually did.

The positions were genuinely different. Tabby started in Dubai in 2019, built by Hosam Arab, who had run the regional fashion retailer Namshi and therefore came at the problem from the merchant's side of the counter. It grew as a regional shopping app first. Tamara started in Riyadh in 2020, founded by Abdulmajeed Alsukhan with Turki Bin Zarah and Abdulmohsen Al Babtain, and positioned itself from the beginning as the homegrown Saudi one, which is exactly the story that brought Sanabil, the Public Investment Fund vehicle, and SNB Capital in to co-lead its Series C.

Two clearly different positions. Now look at where each one ended up.

Tabby holds consumer finance and small business finance licences from SAMA, bought the Saudi wallet operator Tweeq, moved its headquarters from the Emirates to Riyadh, took a stored value licence in the Emirates to launch Tabby Cash, and says the new money is for credit and money management products beyond buy now pay later. Tamara holds a SAMA consumer finance licence that lets it write tickets above 5,000 riyals, raised an asset backed facility of up to 2.4 billion dollars, and reported first quarter 2026 revenue up 210 per cent on the back of an Islamic financing product that went from nothing to 27 per cent of revenue.

Both of them stopped being instalment buttons and became licensed consumer lenders. They arrived there from opposite starting positions, at roughly the same time, by roughly the same route. When two competitors with genuinely different positioning converge on the identical business model, the positioning was not the variable that decided anything. It was the story told about a decision that was being made on the balance sheet.

What twenty five million registered users counts

Tabby's own word is registered. It says registered users, and that is an accurate and honest description of what the company is counting: accounts created. The distortion happens one step downstream, where every retelling drops the adjective and the number becomes 25 million users, then 25 million customers.

Here is what makes the drop material. In September 2024 Tabby stated it had 14 million users and that more than 80 per cent of them were in Saudi Arabia, which puts about 11 million Saudi accounts on the board at that date.

Now the primary source nobody in this category quotes. SAMA's own fintech reporting tracked registered buy now pay later customers in Saudi Arabia at 76,000 in 2020, 3 million in 2021, and 10 million in 2022. That is the entire Saudi market, every provider added together, at 10 million registered customers.

Separately, a March 2025 reading put the share of Saudi consumers who have ever used a buy now pay later service at 42 per cent, which against the adult population lands in roughly the same place: a real user base somewhere around ten million people, not tens of millions.

So the company figures and the market figures are describing different things. A registered account is created once per app. A person who has both Tabby and Tamara on their phone, which in a market with two dominant providers and a checkout that offers both is the ordinary case rather than the exception, appears once in each company's total. Add the two totals together, as every summary of this race does, and you have double counted that person on purpose.

None of which makes either company small. Tabby reports more than 18 billion dollars of annualised transaction volume and says it has been profitable since 2023. Those are serious numbers and the second one is the only genuinely rare thing in the whole story. But 45 million is not a count of people, and the merchant counts drift the same way: Tabby's partner figure appears as 40,000, then 65,000, then 70,000 inside about a year and a half, and Tamara's as 30,000 in one account and 87,000 in another. When a figure moves that much between retellings, the figure is not being measured. It is being quoted.

The scoreboard

Almost every figure in this table is either a price set on a date, a capacity, or a company stated count, and the table labels each one as such. The valuations are prices paid for shares on the dates given, and the October 2025 one is a secondary sale between shareholders rather than money raised by the business. The user, customer and merchant counts are company statements and are not audited; registered means an account was created, and the two companies count anybody holding both apps separately. The 2.4 billion dollar figure is borrowing capacity secured against customer receivables, not equity and not a valuation. The profitability claim is the company's own. The regulator's registered customer series and the electronic payments share are SAMA figures, and the credit card penetration and consumer usage readings are third party market research. Population figures are 2026 estimates used here only to give the user claims a denominator. Several publishers carrying these figures are blocked by the egress proxy used to research this piece, including forbes.com and techcrunch.com, so the underlying announcements were confirmed through search results and through outlets quoting them rather than by opening them directly.

The autopsy: every number on the board is an input

Take the four headline numbers in order and ask what each one actually is.

The 4.5 billion dollars, which is the figure the plan leads with, came from a secondary share sale in October 2025. No new shares were issued and Tabby received no proceeds from it. Existing shareholders sold to incoming ones at a price that implied 4.5 billion for the whole company. That is a real price and it is genuine evidence of investor appetite, and it is not money the business raised, spent or earned. The company's own last primary round before it had been 160 million dollars at 3.3 billion in February 2025.

Then it moved. On 14 September 2026 Tabby raised 233 million dollars at 6.5 billion, led by Blue Pool Capital with HSG, Wellington Management and Arbor Ventures. Inside eleven months the headline valuation went 3.3, then 4.5, then 6.5. Every one of those is correct on its date and wrong the day after, which is the same trap Liquid Death's 1.4 billion set in Episode 10, arriving here twice as fast.

Tamara's billion is the opposite failure. It was set in December 2023 by the 340 million dollar Series C that made it the first Saudi fintech unicorn, and no primary round has repriced it since. That figure is now approaching three years old and is still quoted in the present tense. Market participants estimate the company is worth 1.5 to 2 billion today, which is an estimate and not a price, and the distinction is the entire lesson of Episode 10: a price is what somebody paid on a date, an estimate is what somebody thinks, and only one of them is evidence.

The 2.4 billion dollars is the number most often misread, and the misreading is not subtle. It is not a valuation and not an investment in Tamara. It is an asset backed facility from Goldman Sachs, Citi and Apollo funds, structured as a warehouse securitisation of buy now pay later receivables originated by Tamara Finance Company, with an initial 1.4 billion and a further billion available over three years. In plain terms, it is a credit line secured against money customers owe. It is inventory for a lending business. Reporting it alongside a valuation, which is what almost every summary of this race does, adds a debt facility to an equity price and calls the total a scoreboard.

Which brings the pattern into view. A valuation is a price paid for shares. A secondary is a price paid between shareholders. A user count is accounts opened. A merchant count is contracts signed. A transaction volume is money moving through the pipe. A facility is borrowing capacity. Six numbers, and every one of them measures an input, a capacity or an opinion.

The number that would settle whether any of this worked is the one neither company publishes and no case study asks for: what share of those registered accounts transacted in the last ninety days, and what the repeat rate looks like by cohort. That figure exists inside both companies to a decimal place. It has never been in a press release, and its absence is more informative than anything in the scoreboard above.

The control group, which this category actually has

This episode did not have to argue about counterfactuals, because the category ran the experiment in public.

Spotii launched in 2020 out of the Emirates, founded by Anuscha Iqbal and Ziyaad Ahmed, selling the same product into the same three markets Tabby and Tamara were selling into. In 2021 it was acquired by Zip, an Australian listed buy now pay later company with real capital and a decade of operating experience, at a price reported variously as 16 million, 16.3 million, 20 million and 21 million dollars depending on which outlet you read, which is a small comic demonstration of the same figure drift running through the rest of this case. Spotii reached more than a million registered customers and about 1,500 merchant partners, and secured a buy now pay later licence from the Saudi central bank.

Same product. Same markets. Same years. A licence. A listed parent. And by the middle of 2023 Zip had wound the Middle East business down as part of a review of non core operations, to stop the cash burn.

So the thing that separated the survivors from the casualty was not the idea, not the market, not the timing and not the licence, because Spotii had all four. Postpay, Cashew, Madfu and MIS Forward are all still there and none of them is in this conversation. What the two survivors had that the others did not is the ability to keep funding receivables at scale, and access to the specific capital that lets you do that: sovereign linked equity in Sanabil and SNB Capital for Tamara and Hassana for Tabby, and then billion dollar credit lines from global institutions on top.

And then the control group inside the race, which is the cleanest part. Tabby and Tamara are each other's counterfactual. Different founders, different home markets, different origin stories, genuinely different positioning. Both ended as licensed consumer finance companies with large asset backed facilities, expanding into wallets, cards and instalment credit above the small ticket line. If positioning had been the deciding variable, two different positions would have produced two different outcomes. They produced the same one.

This is the Episode 12 finding in a new category. When a tactic is widely available and only some parties survive it, look at what the survivors had that the casualties did not, and be honest when the answer is money rather than message.

The right order: the licence, the book, then the brand

Step one is to work out which of your numbers is an input and which is a result, and never let the two share a table. Money raised, accounts opened, contracts signed and credit available are inputs. Revenue from a returning customer is a result. This sounds obvious written down and almost nobody does it, because the input numbers are bigger, they arrive earlier, and they are the ones a press release can carry. If your board deck leads with a figure that would still have gone up in a quarter where every customer bought once and never came back, that figure is not measuring your marketing.

Step two is to find the structural permission before you spend on the message. In this category it was a SAMA licence, and it decided more than any campaign did. In most sectors it is duller and just as decisive: a regulatory approval, a distribution agreement, a payment rail, a supplier contract, a category exclusivity. The question to ask before signing off a marketing budget is what the thing is that a competitor cannot simply copy next quarter, and whether you have it yet. Marketing spend aimed at demand you are not licensed, funded or supplied to serve is spend that converts into a competitor's customer.

Step three is to write down the one number that would prove the strategy wrong, and publish it internally every month whether it flatters you or not. For a business that lends, it is repeat rate and loss rate by cohort. For most others it is the share of revenue from customers acquired more than a year ago. The discipline is choosing it before the campaign, because a metric selected afterwards is always selected to agree with the decision already taken.

At Saudi scale these three get easier, not harder. A Riyadh company turning over 40 million riyals has the cohort data Tabby and Tamara have, in the same form, sitting in its point of sale records and its CRM, and it does not have to explain the answer to a growth stage investor who would rather hear about registered users. The local wrinkle is the funding culture itself. In a market where the Public Investment Fund and its vehicles are a visible and legitimate source of growth capital, the temptation is to build the company that raises well rather than the company that compounds, and those two are not the same company. Raising well is a real skill and a real advantage here. It is a means, and the moment it starts being reported internally as the score, the marketing function has stopped being measured at all.

The order is the point. The licence and the balance sheet decide whether you get to play. The brand decides what you are worth once you are playing. Run them in that order and the marketing budget is an investment. Run them backwards and you are Spotii: right product, right market, right licence, wrong balance sheet, gone by the middle of 2023.

The takeaways

A funding scoreboard scores inputs. A valuation, a user count, a merchant count, a transaction volume and a credit facility all go up in a quarter where no customer ever comes back a second time.

Read the adjective. Tabby says registered users and means accounts opened. Two companies claiming 45 million between them in markets holding 54 million people are counting accounts and counting the same person twice.

A valuation is a price on a date. Tabby's went 3.3 to 4.5 to 6.5 billion dollars inside eleven months, and the 4.5 was a secondary sale that put no money into the company. Tamara's billion has not been repriced since December 2023.

A debt facility is not a valuation. Tamara's 2.4 billion dollars is a securitisation of customer receivables, which is to say borrowing capacity for a lending book, and it belongs nowhere near an equity price.

Check whether the positioning actually decided anything. Tabby and Tamara started from opposite positions and both ended as licensed consumer lenders with billion dollar credit lines, which means the position was the story and not the cause.

The casualty proves the point better than the survivors. Spotii had the same product, the same markets, a central bank licence and a listed parent, and was wound down in 2023. What it did not have was the balance sheet to fund receivables at scale.

Frequently asked questions

This article is part of BMD's marketing case-study series. Episode 16 opens the Gulf run. Episode 17 is the company that went from nothing to a 1.5 billion dollar valuation in three years, the fastest unicorn the Kingdom has produced, built on about a hundred dark stores and an operation rather than a campaign. That is Ninja.

Sources and further reading

About BMD

Most companies don't have a marketing problem. They have a marketing department that was never built. BMD is a boutique consultancy that installs structured, measurable marketing departments inside mid-market companies across the GCC. We don't run your campaigns, and we don't hand you a strategy deck and leave. We build the operating system: the structure, the measurement, and the ownership that turn marketing into a function leadership can rely on. The method is the BUILD framework, published and practiced: a book, an online program, a community of Gulf founders and marketers applying it, and diagnostics that replace assumptions with measurement. Delivered in Arabic and English, founder-led.

Redha Alayesh

A marketer with a software engineer's discipline and a scientist's mindset. Across 40+ marketing departments in the GCC, he built the BUILD framework to solve the problem he kept finding: capable marketers trapped inside companies that never built them a department.