News
Pyypl Growth To Accelerate After $20 Million Investment
The Abu Dhabi-based financial platform continues to go from strength to strength, with sights set on a huge regional expansion.
Pyypl (pronounced “people”), the Middle East and Africa-focused financial services platform, has just secured $20 million in Series B funding from international investors, as well as ten of its existing backers.
Since being founded in 2017, the Hub71 member has raised nearly $40 million in investment capital. This recent financing round will help the platform increase its reach even deeper into the MEA region.
As the company develops what’s known as “Pyypl 2.0”, new features and proprietary technology will also be built to enhance user experience and help scale in new markets and business verticals. Pyypl is led by a skilled management team with a proven track record and is now one of the fastest-growing fintech companies in the region, quadrupling its user base and transaction volumes in just 12 months.
Pyypl has established key partnerships since its foundation, and now boasts a mature and expansive financial ecosystem that includes Visa, several payment gateway partners, Ripple, and Binance. Based in Hub71, Abu Dhabi’s global tech ecosystem, Pyypl also gains access to a wide-ranging network of partners and benefits from a strong local talent base.
Also Read: Paymob Announces New UAE Regional Hub
The combination of proprietary technology, an experienced management team, and a unique multi-product approach is paying dividends for the startup, which seems to have been founded at the exact right time to benefit from the region’s growing tech landscape. The ecosystem boasts “internationally accepted virtual and physical prepaid cards, instant domestic and international user-to-user transfers as well as remittances to 38 currency destinations”, with plenty of additional features being added to the roadmap.
“We welcome our new investors and appreciate the further investment from our existing shareholders to support our financial inclusion journey. We have grown significantly since our Series A round and are excited to enter the next phase of growth and capability. This is just the beginning,” says Antti Arponen, co-founder and CEO at Pyypl.
Pyypl’s platform offers key financial services via a single app, and could benefit up to 800 million financially underserved smartphone users across Africa and the Middle East.
News
Google Releases Veo 2 AI Video Tool To MENA Users
The state-of-the-art video generation model is now available in Gemini, offering realistic AI-generated videos with better physics, motion, and detail.
Starting today, users of Gemini Advanced in the MENA region — and globally — can tap into Veo 2, Google’s next-generation video model.
Originally unveiled in 2024, Veo 2 has now been fully integrated into Gemini, supporting multiple languages including Arabic and English. The rollout now brings Google’s most advanced video AI directly into the hands of everyday users.
Veo 2 builds on the foundations of its predecessor with a more sophisticated understanding of the physical world. It’s designed to produce high-fidelity video content with cinematic detail, realistic motion, and greater visual consistency across a wide range of subjects and styles. Whether recreating natural landscapes, human interactions, or stylized environments, the model is capable of interpreting and translating written prompts into eight-second 720p videos that feel almost handcrafted.
Users can generate content directly through the Gemini platform — either via the web or mobile apps. The experience is pretty straightforward: users enter a text-based prompt, and Veo 2 returns a video in 16:9 landscape format, delivered as an MP4 file. These aren’t just generic clips — they can reflect creative, abstract, or highly specific scenarios, making the tool especially useful for content creators, marketers, or anyone experimenting with visual storytelling.
Also Read: Getting Started With Google Gemini: A Beginner’s Guide
To ensure transparency, each video is embedded with SynthID — a digital watermark developed by Google’s DeepMind. The watermark is invisible to the human eye but persists across editing, compression, and sharing. It identifies the video as AI-generated, addressing concerns around misinformation and media authenticity.
While Veo 2 is still in its early phases of public rollout, the technology is part of a broader push by Google to democratize advanced AI tools. With text-to-image, code generation, and now video creation integrated into Gemini, Google is positioning the platform as a full-spectrum creative assistant.
Access to Veo 2 starts today and will continue expanding in the coming weeks. Interested users can try it out at gemini.google.com or through the Gemini app on Android and iOS.
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