Ayham Gorani did not set out to build a fintech company. He set out to fix a chore he knew too well. After building and selling a company in Germany and moving to the United Arab Emirates in 2011, he kept seeing the same thing in small businesses. Finance was still run by hand, late at night, in spreadsheets, by founders who had better things to do.
In 2022, most small and medium sized businesses relied on shared company cards or employees’ personal cards, cash advances and petty cash. Receipts were chased at the end of every month, and the figures were reconciled in spreadsheets, often by the founder late at night. It cost businesses hours they never got back, and it gave them very little visibility of where their money was going.
The problem he saw in every small business
Gorani cofounded Pemo in 2022 with Valerie Konde, Alessandro Duri and Saed Ghorani, to bring all of that into one platform. Corporate cards, expense management, accounting automation and invoice management
would sit together, replacing manual tracking and patchy finance workflows. Put simply, the team is building the finance function that small firms cannot yet afford to hire.
What the AI does, and where it still gets it wrong
Receipts reach Pemo by upload, email or WhatsApp, and the company’s AI reads each one, including the invoice number and the supplier’s tax registration number. It checks the receipt for fraud and matches it to the right card transaction. Pemo Copilot then fills in the accounting fields, such as the chart of accounts and the vendor, and it learns from every correction an accountant makes.
After a couple of cycles, the AI gets it wrong in less than 1% of cases, Gorani says, and those cases follow a pattern. New companies with little transaction history, first time merchants no other UAE company has dealt with, a single receipt covering several types of cost, and judgement calls on how an item should be coded. That is where the finance team comes in, moving from typing data to reviewing it.
For Pemo’s customers, closing the books at month end has gone from around seven days to a couple of hours. Across the market, Gorani says, employees still spend roughly eight hours a month on expense admin. His goal is a close that takes under an hour.
A licence, a bank account and a deadline
2026 has been a busy year for Pemo. The Central Bank of the UAE granted the company in principle approval for a Stored Value Facilities licence on 28 July. Then, on 4 August, Pemo launched a business account with ruya, the Ajman based Islamic digital bank, with an expected profit rate of up to 3.75% on idle cash. Gorani says hundreds of businesses have already opened one, and adoption has beaten the company’s own expectations.
The licence matters because Pemo looks after companies’ money, and trust is everything in that job. Gorani will not speculate on when the full licence will arrive, since that rests with the regulator. The partnership with ruya stays exactly as it is, he says, with any future licence sitting alongside it. For customers, the account they hold today will not change.
E-invoicing is the next deadline. Pemo is integrating with an Accredited Service Provider approved by the Ministry of Finance, so customers create an invoice in Pemo and the provider validates it, delivers it to the buyer and reports it to the Federal Tax Authority. Businesses with annual revenue of AED 50 million or more must appoint a provider by 30 October 2026, ahead of the first mandatory phase in January 2027. Smaller firms follow on 1 July 2027, and must appoint a provider by 31 March 2027.
Pemo launched e-invoicing in November, and it will go live for customers within one to two weeks, according to the company.
The number he will watch over the next year
Gorani’s test for the next twelve months is simple. If Pemo’s customers can close their month in under an hour, that is the clearest sign the admin has gone, because it measures the whole process from the first receipt to the final reconciliation. A strong supporting signal would be the share of receipts captured without anyone having to chase them. His goal is above 99%.
Pemo has grown quickly since 2022. A $7 million funding round led by Augmentum Fintech was announced in 2024, when the company had passed $1.4 billion in transactions and worked with more than 4,000 businesses. It is headquartered in Dubai, with offices in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Gorani’s own path began in Germany, where he studied computer science and founded his first company while still at university.
What Gorani’s bet means for the UAE’s small businesses
Here is the honest read. Plenty of fintech founders promise to remove admin, and most of them only move it somewhere else. Gorani’s bet is narrower and more believable: win the month end close, and the rest follows. If he is right, the change will not feel like a revolution. It will feel like a quiet Friday afternoon, when the finance lead goes home on time and nobody chases a receipt. That is a small thing, and for a small business it is everything.
