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Bahrain-Based Cryptocurrency Exchange Rain Raises $110 Million
The financial injection provided by the Series B funding round is supposed to help Rain double the number of its employees, which currently sits at 400.
After raising $6 million in a Series A led by MEVP in January 2021, Bahrain-based cryptocurrency exchange Rain has another reason to celebrate: the recent $110 million Series B funding round.
Co-led by Paradigm and Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Cadenza Ventures, and others, the round is one of the largest ones for any startup in the Middle East & North Africa.
“We are very excited about this funding opportunity as it allows us to continue conversations with regulators across the MENA region, Turkey, and Pakistan about the benefits and potential of cryptocurrency” stated the co-founding team. “It will also support our overarching mission of providing education and access to cryptocurrency to all of our supported markets”.
Rain was founded in 2017 by Abdullah Almoaiqel, AJ Nelson, Joseph Dallago, and Yehia Badawy. The exchange allows customers from the Middle East to easily buy and sell cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. So far, it has processed transactions worth more than $1.9 billion, serving 185,000 users across 50 countries.
The financial injection provided by the Series B funding round is supposed to help the exchange double the number of its employees, which currently sits at 400.
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“We believe that Rain is a crucial piece of the puzzle for bringing the Middle East deeper into the new crypto economy” said Casey Caruso, investing partner at Paradigm.
Indeed, the interest in cryptocurrency has been booming across the MENA region, with both individual retail investors and institutions embracing cryptocurrencies as the future of finance.
Dubai, for example, wants to become the world’s cryptocurrency capital by creating a comprehensive ecosystem for cryptocurrencies and providers of related services in the form of a special crypto zone at the Dubai World Trade Center.
News
Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon
Foreign visitors will be the first users to benefit, but whether Syria’s own banks and cardholders follow is still an open question.
Visa is returning to Syria. Its first live international card transaction in the country was a test rather than a launch, and the milestone event ran through a Lebanese bank.
The acquirer (the bank on the merchant’s side of a card payment) was Fransabank Lebanon, with Paymera as the other named partner. Nadim Moujaes, who heads a Fransabank Group subsidiary, describes the test as both the culmination of “longstanding efforts to link Syria back to international payment networks” and “the first step in a larger path”.
Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa makes the first electronic payment in Syria using a @Visa card at a store in Damascus, following the lifting of US sanctions on Syria. pic.twitter.com/lpAN7nQ6Fc
— Tech Magazine (@TechMGZN) August 27, 2026
“We are excited to have successfully tested live transactions today as we plan to enable international visitors to use their Visa cards while in Syria,” says Leila Serhan, Visa’s senior vice president and group country manager for the North Africa, Levant and Pakistan region. Although a significant first step, that plan doesn’t come with a hard date for when a visitor’s card will work normally.
Mohammed Safwat Raslan, governor of the Central Bank of Syria, says the test paves the way for international card acceptance in Syria and that maintaining strong compliance, risk management and operational controls will remain essential. Serhan likewise stresses that Visa has worked within applicable legal, regulatory and compliance requirements. For a test transaction, it seems there was a great deal of attention paid to the rules, with the entire operation being carefully managed.
Also Read: Lebanon’s 5G Era Begins With 150 Stations And A $1M Budget
The test is the latest step in a sequence that began in December 2025, when Visa announced a strategic roadmap to support Syria’s integration into the global digital economy. In February 2026 it hosted its first industry gathering of banks, ecosystem partners and policymakers in Damascus and, the same month, signed an agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in San Francisco.
Michel Kattouah, Paymera’s CEO, called the test “the return of international card acceptance,” but while that’s positive news, there’s no word yet on when a Syrian bank will issue a Visa card to a Syrian customer.
Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon
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