Paystack, a Lagos, Nigeria-based payments company, raised $8m in Series A funding.
The round, which brought total investment to date to more than $10m, was led by Stripe, with participation from Visa, follow-on funding from Tencent and Y Combinator, as well as angel investors Tom Stafford (Managing Partner at DST Global), Gbenga Oyebode (founding partner of Aluko & Oyebode and Board member of MTN Nigeria), and Dale Mathias (Co-founder, Innovation Partners Africa).
The company intends to use the funds to accelerate its continental expansion, build out their payments infrastructure, and grow the engineering team.
Launched in January 2016 by Shola Akinlade (CEO) and Ezra Olubi (CTO), Paystack provides payments tools to businesses in Africa. Its APIs allow developers to build modern payments experiences online. With only a few lines of code, developers can create custom checkout experiences, build automated recurring billing systems for subscription products, instantly send bulk transfers to any bank account in Nigeria, verify the identity of customers through five different verification APIs, and more.
Within over two years, the company’s team has grown to process nearly 15% of all online payments in Africa’s largest economy, powering tens of thousands of businesses of all sizes including telcos, airlines, and government agencies.
Through its payments interface, customers can pay with local and international cards, or directly from their bank accounts. Paystack also supports localized payment channels, including mobile money, QR code, and USSD payments. Every payment is screened by fraud-monitoring systems to protect merchants from chargebacks, and Paystack’s direct bank integrations ensure the highest transaction success rates.
Beyond payments, the company provides businesses with growth tools in the form of a Dashboard that allows them to monitor and act on every aspect of their business’ performance, from granular transaction error data, to detailed customer insights.
Paystack was the first Nigerian company to be accepted into Y Combinator.
FinSMEs
28/08/2018