Tarabut Acquires Servable, Accelerating AI-Driven Open Banking in MENA Region

Mohammed Fathy

Last updated 1-02-2026

4 min

Tarabut acquires Bahrain AI startup Servable, signalling MENA fintech is “past the experimental phase”.

The deal embeds AI into regulated open finance, enabling real-time lending, payments and compliance decisions.

Servable brings “production‑ready” tools focused on privacy, governance and audit‑friendly AI deployment.

Executives say the move helps banks scale secure finance faster across the GCC.

Tarabut has taken another big swing at building serious financial plumbing in the region, announcing the acquisition of Servable, a Bahrain-founded AI engineering startup focused on heavily regulated industries. On paper, it’s about embedding AI into open banking. In practice, it feels like a signal that MENA fintech is moving past the experimental phase and into something far more grown-up.

The deal folds Servable’s AI capabilities straight into Tarabut’s regulated open finance platform, pushing the company beyond data access and towards real-time decision-making across lending, payments and embedded finance. That means tools for income verification, credit risk assessment, fraud detection and compliance automation, all wrapped up with strong guardrails around data privacy, governance and explainability. To be honest, those last bits are often a bit of a faff for startups in finance, so seeing them front and centre is spot on.

Servable isn’t just another AI buzzword machine. Its platform is already production-ready and built for environments where regulators are always looking over your shoulder. It’s organised around three pillars: a Data Agent that helps create synthetic, privacy-preserving datasets; an AI Lab for securely training and testing models, including large language models; and an AI Gateway that manages how those models are deployed and monitored in the real world. Together, it allows institutions to move from tinkering to actually shipping AI systems that auditors won’t have a heart attack over.

I’ve seen founders across the region struggle with that exact jump, especially when banks say they want innovation but won’t budge on compliance, well… I mean, rightly so. That said, I reckon this acquisition gives Tarabut a real edge, not just technically but culturally, by baking AI governance into the core rather than bolting it on later.

Servable has already been used for financial reporting, operational automation and customer engagement, and it picked up first place at the 22nd StartUp Bahrain Pitch in December 2025. That detail might sound small, but anyone who’s been around those pitch stages knows it’s a tough crowd, and winning there usually means you’re onto something.

Abdulla Almoayed, founder and CEO of Tarabut, said the company’s ambition has always been to build world-class infrastructure from the region for the region. Bringing Servable into the group, he noted, allows AI engineering and decisioning to be embedded directly into Tarabut’s platform, helping banks offer faster and more secure access to finance at scale. From Servable’s side, founder and CEO Mohamed Alderazi said the startup was built to help regulated institutions turn AI experiments into real outcomes without compromising on security, and that joining Tarabut will let its technology reach banks and fintechs already live across the GCC.

Tarabut, which operates across Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, has form here. It was among the first to join the Saudi Central Bank’s regulatory sandbox and secured in-principle approval from the UAE’s central bank last year. The company also raised $32 million in a Series A round in May 2023, backed by investors including Pinnacle Capital, Visa, Tiger Global and Aljazira Capital.

Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, which is fairly standard. On the flip side, the strategic intent is crystal clear. As AI-enabled decisioning becomes less of a nice-to-have and more of a must-have for banks in the GCC, Tarabut is positioning itself right at the centre of that shift. Over here at Arageek, we’ve watched many startups promise the moon on AI, only to trip up on regulation. This move feels different, and I’m not usually chuffed to bits about acquisitions, but this one definately deserves a closer look.

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