The archive · Money & Fintech · Product decision · 2021–2025
Qlub's QR table-checkout bet now runs 3,000+ restaurants in 10+ markets
Qlub digitizes restaurant bills with QR scan-to-pay; Dubai-born in 2021, it raised a $17M seed and by 2025 served 3,000+ restaurants in 10+ markets.
Qlub
What the business is
A payment platform for restaurants: diners scan a table QR to see menus, order and pay by card, Apple Pay or installments, without staff or a physical terminal.
Starting capital：$17M seed announced 2022-01-31; $30M Series B announced 2025-07-20
How it started
Co-founder Eyad Alkassar, who had built food-delivery startups and led Rocket Internet's Middle East business, was struck that dine-in payments had barely changed since credit cards. In 2021 he and Mahmoud Fouz founded Qlub to combine two pandemic mega-trends — QR codes in restaurants and cashless payment — into table-side checkout, describing it as creating the payment function of the future.
What happened
After a stealth build, Qlub announced a $17M seed round on 2022-01-31, co-led by Berlin's Cherry Ventures and Point Nine Capital with STV, Raed Ventures, Heartcore, Shorooq Partners and FinTech Collective, and launched in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and India. It claims restaurant partners see 80% faster checkout, a roughly 300% increase in tips and about one-third fewer cashier staff, and it had signed international chains including Wagamama, Sushi Samba and La Petite Maison.
How it ended up
On 2025-07-20 Qlub announced a $30M Series B co-led by Shorooq Partners and Cherry Ventures, with e&, Mubadala Investments and Legend Capital participating. MENAbytes reported the platform is used by over 3,000 restaurants in more than ten markets — the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Brazil, South Korea and the US — processing billions of dollars in annual payment volume and serving millions of customers a month.
Background
Qlub is a Dubai-born payment platform that lets restaurant customers scan a QR code at their table to browse the menu, order and pay from their own phone — no app download, no registration, no waiting for the card machine. The bet, in co-founder Eyad Alkassar's words, was that two pandemic mega-trends, QR codes in restaurants and cashless payment, would finally modernize the dine-in bill into the payment function of the future.
Founded in 2021 by Alkassar and Mahmoud Fouz, Qlub stayed in stealth until 2022-01-31, when TechCrunch reported its $17M seed round, co-led by Cherry Ventures and Point Nine Capital with STV, Raed Ventures, Heartcore, Shorooq Partners and FinTech Collective. The team drew on founders and executives who had scaled Lazada, Namshi and Snapp, and launched in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and India before expanding further.
By 2025 the model had measurable effects for restaurants: partners reported 80% faster checkout, a roughly 300% rise in tips, about one-third fewer cashier staff and seven times more positive Google reviews. With over 3,000 restaurants in 10+ markets and billions of dollars in annual payment volume, Qlub raised a $30M Series B on 2025-07-20, co-led by Shorooq Partners and Cherry Ventures with e&, Mubadala and Legend Capital, to keep scaling globally.
What has to be true
- Waiting for the terminal, splitting bills and calculating tips is the restaurant bottleneck; Qlub's partners report faster checkout, higher tips and fewer cashier staff once it disappears.
- The pandemic had already made QR menus and contactless payment familiar, so Qlub did not have to invent consumer behavior, only combine two habits at the table.
- Zero-app checkout removed the adoption barrier for diners while supporting cards, Apple Pay and installment plans, matching how people in each market already pay.
- Outside the US no standard table-checkout layer existed, so a first mover in the UAE and Saudi Arabia could become the default infrastructure before global incumbents arrived.
What can be applied
Find a payment moment every consumer has felt and remove its friction; restaurants adopted the product because it cut staff cost and raised tips, not because of the technology.
Aftermath
As of 2025-07-20 Qlub was privately held and scaling: MENAbytes reported more than 3,000 restaurants across 10+ markets, billions of dollars in annualized payment volume and millions of monthly customers, with chains such as Wagamama, Sushi Samba and La Petite Maison among its clients. The Series B was earmarked for entering new geographic markets, adding analytics and deepening integrations with hospitality platforms, positioning the startup as infrastructure for the restaurant industry's digital transformation rather than just a checkout button.
Sources
- Sunday competitor Qlub emerges with $17M seed round from Cherry and Point Nine
- Dubai fintech Qlub raises $30 million Series B to scale its restaurant payments platform globally
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