Foodics Teams Up with Lean to Revolutionise Saudi Restaurant Fintech

Foodics, the Saudi-born restaurant management powerhouse, has taken another step deeper into fintech waters. The company has just teamed up with Lean Technologies, one of the region’s frontrunners in open banking, in a deal announced during the Money20/20 Middle East conference in Riyadh. The move might sound a bit technical on first glance, but in practice it means restaurant owners will be able to see all their cashflow, across multiple bank accounts, in one neat dashboard inside the Foodics console. No more hopping between apps or logins—something many small operators I’ve spoken with describe as a bit of a faff.

What’s particularly spot on here is the blend of operational and financial oversight. With Lean’s infrastructure baked in, Foodics users can monitor revenues, balances, and projections in real time, rather than waiting for clunky statements or out-of-date spreadsheets. And believe it or not, the system also builds an instant credit profile based on business performance. That feeds straight into Foodics Capital, giving merchants a chance to unlock funding faster than under traditional lending channels that can take weeks, sometimes months, to churn through.

Ahmad AlZaini, Foodics’ co-founder and CEO, put it plainly in a statement: full visibility equals power. From his perspective, allowing merchants to see their finances in one place arms them with confidence to “fuel their growth and build more resilient businesses.” On the flip side, Lean’s co-founder Hisham Al-Falih described the partnership as the foundation for Foodics’ shift from point-of-sale vendor into what he called a “financial enabler” for the Kingdom’s retail and hospitality sectors.

I reckon this push could be a game changer for SMEs that often stumble when it comes to managing liquidity. The flexibility to prove their creditworthiness with live performance data—rather than stacks of old paperwork—feels very much in line with Saudi Arabia’s wider fintech and open banking agenda. Still, it will only deliver real impact if merchants actually adopt these new tools. Tech is great, but if the end users don’t buy into it, the most elegant solution ends up gathering dust.

Here at Arageek, we’ve often seen that the smallest step—say, reconciling accounts on one screen instead of three—is what frees up entrepreneurs to think strategically, rather than firefighting the day-to-day. I remember chatting to a café owner in Amman who told me how exhausting it was having to log in to five different platforms just to track his expenses. “By the time I’m done,” he said, “I’m too knackered to think about growth.” That’s exactly the gap Foodics and Lean seem eager to close, and I’d be chuffed to bits if it genuinely lightens that burden across the region.

Foodics, founded back in 2014, already processes billions of transactions and has raised $170 million in Series C funding, cementing itself as one of the strongest SaaS stories to emerge from the MENA region. Lean, meanwhile, was established in 2019 and now serves more than 300 businesses, handling over $2 billion in transaction volume. Together, their partnership feels less like a side project and more like a deliberate step into what could quickly become the new normal for financial management in the F&B scene.

The Kingdom’s digital economy is moving fast, and while open banking may sound like jargon, it’s quietly shifting how money flows behind the scenes. This deal is another sign Saudis aren’t just following global fintech trends—they’re trying to set them. Whether it pays off in smoother operations and more inclusive funding for small KSA businesses… well, we’ll have to wait and see. But it’s definately one to keep an eye on.

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