The Tamara story: how the grocery notebook became a unicorn
An old idea from the neighborhood grocery's notebook became a company valued at $1 billion, and its Saudi arm posted its first full-year profit in 2025. This is the Tamara story.
Watch the documentary
Opens on YouTubeBefore apps and cards, every neighborhood grocery had a notebook. You took what you needed, the owner wrote down your name, and you paid at the end of the month. That notebook is the idea behind Tamara.
The founders
Abdulmajeed Alsukhan studied financial economics at California State University and earned a master's in economic policy from Boston University. He worked in investment management at the Saudi Central Bank, then founded a delivery company called Habli, which was acquired by Nana, where he became CFO.
He had two partners:
- Turki Bin Zarah, who worked in consulting and tech, including LinkedIn, Kearney and Strategy&.
- Abdulmohsen Albabtain, a former management consultant at Boston Consulting Group and a 2018 MiSK fellow.
The idea: the notebook with a new tool
In September 2020 Tamara launched in Riyadh. The idea is simple: buy now, split the amount into payments with no interest, in a Sharia-compliant way.
The merchant pays the fee, because the merchant sells more. In December 2023 Tamara dropped late fees.
You don't have to invent a new habit. Sometimes it's enough to give an old habit a new tool.
Making it easy for merchants
Tamara didn't wait for merchants to build the integration themselves. It shipped ready-made plugins for platforms like Salla, Zid and Shopify, and works both online and at in-store points of sale.
Funding
- January 2021: A $6 million seed round led by Impact46.
- April 2021: A $110 million Series A (equity and debt) led by Checkout.com.
- August 2022: A $100 million Series B led by Sanabil.
- December 2023: A $340 million Series C led by SNB Capital and Sanabil, at a $1 billion valuation, making it a unicorn.
- September 2025: A $2.4 billion asset-backed facility from Goldman Sachs, Citi and Apollo.
Where is it now?
In 2025 it received a consumer finance licence from the Saudi Central Bank. The same year, its Saudi arm posted its first full-year profit: $51.5 million net, on $360 million in revenue.
Today Tamara says it has more than 25 million customers and more than 130,000 merchants, operating in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain.
The lesson for you as a founder
Look for the behavior people already have. If you can make it easier and safer, you don't need to convince them of anything new.
Sources: MENAbytes 2021, The National 2021, Wamda 2021, Tamara 2022, TechCrunch 2023, SAMA 2025, Arab News 2025, FWDstart 2026, Tamara 2026.
