1 Startup · $11M · UAE Rental Fintech

What they're building

Keyper is converting one of the strangest legacies of the UAE rental market — paying a year's rent via one to four post-dated paper cheques — into monthly digital payments. Its Rent Now, Pay Monthly product pays landlords their full rental income upfront while tenants pay in installments, wrapped in a platform that also handles property management and embedded financial services. The rent advances are funded through a $30M Shariah-compliant sukuk facility from Franklin Templeton, so the fintech engine has institutional capital behind it. Traction to date: over $44M in rent financed since launch ($19M in the first half of 2026 alone), more than 10,500 properties worth over $6B on platform, around 4,000 landlords, 100,000+ app downloads, and partnerships with the Dubai Land Department, Abu Dhabi's ADRES, Property Finder, Visa, and Mashreq.

Why this matters

Dubai registered over AED 100 billion (~$27B) in tenancy contracts last year and most of it still settles by post-dated cheque — one of the largest pools of barely-digitized recurring payments in the Gulf, as one investor put it. Keyper is positioning as the infrastructure layer rather than a rent app: whoever owns the payment rails for how an entire market pays, borrows, and invests against its homes sits at the center of it. The syndicate is a distribution strategy in itself — Mashreq's CVC for banking rails, Property Finder for reaching renters at the point of home search, Ellington (a developer) and ANB for supply-side reach, plus government-adjacent DFDF. Founded in 2022 by Omar Abu Innab and Walid Shihabi, the company follows a $6.5M seed, a $4M pre-Series A, and the Franklin Templeton facility.