Fintech 2.0: What Makes a Startup Appealing to Investors in 2025?

The global economic outlook in 2025 remains uncertain. Inflationary pressures persist across major markets, and shifting trade and tariff policies continue to disrupt global supply chains. In response, leading analysts, including those at the IMF, have revised their growth forecasts downward. For fintech founders, this translates into a more selective investment climate.

Now is perhaps a good time to reconsider what the essential focus ought to be, if they’re aiming to appeal to potential investors or land the kind of funding deals that might allow them to pursue their growth plans and prosper.

Defining features of a serious startup

Fintech startups, wherever they are in the world, need to have at least one good idea that aims to use technology to address demand in several or one specific financial services sector. Beyond that basic premise, they also need to be determined and ambitious enough to reach a point in their development that sees them attracting interest from potential investors. 

In 2025, however—perhaps more so than in recent years or earlier phases of fintech’s evolution—they also need to demonstrate that their unit economics stack up. Investors aren’t looking for rock solid guarantees of skyrocketing growth rates, but they do want to see strong foundations and financial numbers that point in positive directions. 

Potential funders also want to be reassured that companies whose technologies they like are fully compliant with regulatory environments that matter to them. Across the GCC region, for instance, regulatory environments are generally designed to encourage and accommodate fintech innovation, but startups and founders nonetheless need to be cognizant of all the relevant rules and as transparent as they can be about all their activities. 

Shifting expectations

As an innovation-rich ecosystem, fintech naturally lends itself to hype and optimistic speculation about the prospects of startup ventures. New ideas, technologies, and business models often generate excitement long before they prove to be sustainable. While some companies do achieve rapid success, it’s rarely the result of trend-chasing. In fact, one of the defining shifts in 2025 is a move in investor expectations—from high-concept storytelling to clear operational evidence.

Great ideas can still become valuable businesses—Tabby, for example, recently raised $160 million at a $3.3 billion valuation, and Tamara reached a $1 billion valuation in 2023. Both scaled rapidly in the BNPL space across the GCC. What distinguishes them is not just timing or market visibility, but strong fundamentals, smart execution, and scalable infrastructure.

But—all too often—fintech startups are more hype than substance, and sometimes they’re more concerned about chiming in with the latest buzzwords than doing the hard work, with the right people, to keep progressing their products and their propositions. Increasingly, in 2025, it is evidence of having the right fundamental underpinnings in place that potential fintech funders are really on the lookout for. 

AI advancements

Artificial intelligence is, of course, currently among the most exciting, dynamic, and impactful aspects of the technological landscape. Indeed, reports compiled for the consultancy giant McKinsey have said generative AI’s impact on productivity could ultimately be enough to add trillions of dollars’ worth of value to average global economic outputs.

Certainly, financial service operators and investors in GCC countries have been quick to allocate substantial resources towards AI innovation and associated fintech advancements. That inclination should perhaps be no surprise given recent estimates suggest that AI adoption in the Middle East’s banking sector alone could boost the entire region’s GDP by as much as 13.6 per cent by the end of the current decade. 

For fledgling fintech companies, part of that picture is about finding internal efficiencies and leveraging new ways of working that save their own businesses precious time and money. Increasingly, there is also scope for startups to deploy AI in ways that empower individual team members to boost their creative capacities and enhance the value of their human ingenuity.

Scalability and solving problems 

Beneath those broader trends, AI’s usefulness clearly extends to consumer-facing considerations, with AI-empowered banking apps already enhancing user experiences, particularly in customer service contexts, and new forms of functionality being consistently unlocked. The Dubai-based homebuying tech platform Huspy, for example, recently launched the GCC’s first AI-powered mortgage chatbot accessible via WhatsApp. 

But while such innovations are exciting, for investors, AI alone is not a differentiator. It’s not enough for startups to simply adopt the latest technology; what matters is how it's applied—to deliver measurable value, solve identifiable ‘real world’ problems, and mature into scalable solutions.

The fintechs securing capital in 2025 are those that combine product clarity with scalable infrastructure. This doesn’t require the flashiest interface or the widest feature set—it requires solving a specific problem better than anyone else, and being ready to scale that solution across markets or verticals.

Every reason for optimism

While global rates of fintech funding eased off to a degree in 2024, and despite the world economy being beset persistently by high levels of uncertainty, there remains every reason for optimism both among fintech founders and investors. Momentum in the sector continues, especially in regions like the GCC, where innovation is actively supported by governments and regulatory frameworks designed to foster growth. 

Given this, for ambitious founders, the emphasis currently needs to be on getting the fundamentals right, advancing products to greater levels of maturity, delivering unit economics that make sense, ensuring compliance readiness and showcasing—as much as possible—a potential to be scaled up at speed. 

The endless competitiveness of fintech markets and the challenges inherent in starting a business potentially capable of significant scalability can be daunting, but—when the right building blocks are in place—investors will continue to open their wallets to back founders with big dreams and the best ideas around.