Egyptian fintech company, Zeal has raised $10 million in a new funding round as it sets to expand its payment-linked loyalty and merchant intelligence technology across more than four million card-payment terminals globally.
The latest investment brings the company’s total funding to $14 million and is expected to support a major 24-month rollout of its technology through payment acquirers and other financial infrastructure partners.
Zeal, founded in 2019 by Omar Ebeid and Belal Mohamed, develops software that connects existing payment terminals with customer loyalty and business intelligence tools, allowing physical retailers to turn ordinary transactions into useful customer relationships and data.
The company did not disclose the investors participating in the latest round.
“A card payment should be the start of a more useful customer relationship,” said Ebeid, Zeal’s co-founder and CEO.
Global rollout of four million payment terminals
The new funding will help Zeal activate its technology across a pipeline covering more than four million payment terminals, following contracts signed with payment acquirers globally.
The company expects the rollout to take place over the next 24 months, while further expanding its relationships with payment providers and increasing the number of terminals covered by its platform.
Rather than requiring merchants to replace their existing payment infrastructure, Zeal’s model is designed around integrating its software into payment environments that businesses already use.
This gives the company a potential route to reach large numbers of merchants through established payment providers, rather than approaching each retailer individually.
According to Zeal, the funding will also support deeper integrations across different payment environments and expand the tools available to merchants and payment providers for understanding business performance.
The company expects further large enterprise announcements as its network of acquiring partners grows.
Ebeid said the company had spent years addressing the complexity of the payments ecosystem and that the new funding would support “the next 24 months of activation and the next stage of Zeal’s growth.”
Turning payment transactions into customer relationships
At the heart of Zeal’s proposition is a problem faced by many physical retailers, the payment transaction often marks the end of the customer interaction instead of the beginning of a longer relationship.
While online businesses can easily connect purchases to customer accounts, loyalty programmes and data platforms, physical stores frequently lack the infrastructure needed to achieve the same level of customer understanding.
A shopper can walk into a store, purchase a product and pay by card, leaving the merchant with little information beyond the value of the transaction. Zeal is attempting to change that by connecting payment terminals with loyalty systems and customer data workflows.
Through its platform, merchants can configure loyalty programmes involving stamps or points, introduce optional phone-number capture or connect existing loyalty systems to the payment experience.
This means a payment can potentially trigger a loyalty reward while simultaneously generating information that helps the merchant understand repeat customers and purchasing activity.
The company argues that the challenge is not simply creating another application for retailers but connecting several fragmented components of the payments ecosystem.
Terminal manufacturers, payment applications, operating systems and acquiring platforms often have different technical requirements, making integration difficult.
Zeal is positioning its technology as a layer that can help connect these systems and make the payment terminal more useful beyond processing a transaction.
A clearer view of performance for businesses
Beyond customer loyalty, Zeal is also developing tools designed to help merchants and payment providers understand what is happening across their businesses.
Its Merchant Health product, for instance, monitors indicators such as transaction volumes, terminal activity, payment declines and periods of trading inactivity.
This could allow businesses or payment providers to identify unusual changes and investigate them before they become larger problems.
A sudden decline in transactions could indicate reduced customer activity, operational difficulties, payment problems or a merchant that has stopped actively using a particular terminal. Instead of relying entirely on manual monitoring, payment teams can use such information to determine where attention may be required.
The same infrastructure is intended to benefit payment acquirers, payment service providers and independent sales organisations by giving them greater visibility into their merchant networks.
For these companies, the value goes beyond processing payments because the technology can provide additional information that may strengthen relationships with merchants.
Zeal’s co-founder and CTO, Belal Mohamed, said the company’s objective is to connect different parts of the payment experience so that merchants and their payment partners can derive more value from transactions.
“Our work is to connect terminal journeys, loyalty and merchant insight across different payment environments so partners can bring a consistent proposition to their merchants,” he said.
New opportunities for fintech services
Zeal’s expansion comes as payment terminals increasingly evolve from simple card-acceptance devices into software-enabled platforms.
In particular, Android-based payment terminals can support business applications alongside payment functionality, creating opportunities for companies to introduce services such as loyalty, analytics and other merchant tools directly into the checkout environment.
This development could change the role of the traditional payment terminal. Instead of being used only to accept a card or contactless payment, the device can become a gateway to a wider range of merchant services.
For retailers, this could make loyalty programmes and customer engagement tools available through an environment customers already interact with when completing a purchase.
However, deploying such technology at scale remains challenging because payment environments differ from one provider and market to another.
Zeal is therefore relying on relationships with payment acquirers and other partners to access existing terminal networks while adapting its deployments to different platforms, terminals and merchant requirements.
The company believes this distribution model can help bridge the gap between payment processing and customer engagement.
Merchants want loyalty tools that fit naturally into existing payment experiences, while payment providers are increasingly looking for ways to offer merchants services beyond basic transaction processing. Zeal is positioning itself at that intersection.
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