The milestone marks an important step in Foloosi’s regulatory journey as the company works towards obtaining its final licence, subject to fulfilling the remaining requirements and conditions prescribed by the Central Bank of the UAE.
Founded by Omar Bin Brek and Mohan Karuppiah, Foloosi has built its business around helping UAE merchants accept and manage digital payments across online and in-person channels. The company has now surpassed AED 7 billion in payment volume and has served more than 10,000 merchants across the UAE.
Foloosi began as an online payment gateway and has since expanded into a broader merchant payments platform designed to support businesses across multiple payment and operational needs.
Its platform now spans online payment acceptance, payment links, invoicing, subscriptions and recurring payments, QR payments, Tap to Phone, point-of-sale solutions, e-commerce and merchant payment operations.
This broader approach reflects Foloosi’s focus on building payment infrastructure that can support businesses across different stages of their digital journey.
Commenting on the milestone, Omar Bin Brek, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Foloosi, said:
“Receiving In-Principle Approval from the Central Bank of the UAE is an important milestone for Foloosi and reflects the progress we have made in building a strong, secure and scalable payments business in the UAE.
We started Foloosi with a simple ambition: to build payment technology in the UAE that could serve businesses of every size. Today, after processing more than AED 7 billion in payments and serving over 10,000 merchants, we are entering the next chapter of that journey.
Our focus now is to complete the remaining regulatory requirements and continue building Foloosi into a trusted payments infrastructure company for the UAE.”
As Foloosi looks towards the next phase of its development, artificial intelligence is expected to become a foundational layer of its future payment architecture rather than a standalone feature added on top of existing payment products.
Every payment generates valuable signals, including transaction behaviour, device intelligence, merchant patterns, payment method performance, operational events, risk indicators and settlement information.
Foloosi’s long-term vision is to build infrastructure capable of interpreting these signals in real time. This creates the foundation for an AI-native payment infrastructure, where intelligence can continuously support decisions across the payment lifecycle.
AI-powered transaction intelligence can help understand transaction behaviour and identify unusual patterns in real time.
Real-time fraud and risk intelligence is designed to analyse payment, device and behavioural signals before and during transactions.
Intelligent payment orchestration can help determine the appropriate payment route while supporting improved transaction performance.
AI-powered merchant intelligence can transform payment data into actionable insights around customers, revenue and overall business performance.
Automated reconciliation and settlement intelligence is intended to reduce manual payment operations and help merchants understand where their money is across the payment lifecycle.
Over time, Foloosi envisions agentic payment infrastructure where authorised AI agents can interact with payment infrastructure through secure policies, permissions and controls.
The In-Principle Approval from the Central Bank of the UAE represents an important step towards Foloosi’s next phase.
Foloosi will continue working with the Central Bank to fulfil the applicable requirements and conditions required for final licensing. Alongside its regulatory journey, the company plans to continue investing in payment infrastructure, artificial intelligence, fraud and risk technology, merchant intelligence, security and payment operations.
Foloosi was also recognised as part of the UAE Future 100, reflecting its position among companies contributing to the country’s future economic sectors.
The company’s journey from an online payment gateway to a broader merchant payments platform has been shaped by its focus on building payment technology for businesses in the UAE. With more than AED 7 billion in payment volume and over 10,000 merchants served, the company is now working towards its next phase of growth and infrastructure development.
The evolution of payments is moving beyond simply enabling digital transactions. As payment infrastructure generates increasingly valuable data and signals, intelligence can become an integral part of how payment systems operate.
For Foloosi, the long-term vision is centred on building payment infrastructure where intelligence is embedded across the payment lifecycle — from transaction processing and risk management to merchant insights, reconciliation and future agentic capabilities.
“Foloosi is building AI-native payment infrastructure for the UAE”
