Paystack, a Nigerian fintech startup providing payments tools to businesses across Africa, has successfully raised $8 million in Series A funding.
The Lagos-based payments company brought its total investment to date to $10 million following this $8 million Series A round, according to the company’s blog.
The round was led by U.S.-based online payments software company Stripe, and includes credit card firm Visa, along with follow-on funding from Chinese internet-focused multinational investment conglomerate Tencent and Y Combinator, perhaps the world’s most powerful startup accelerator program.
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) also took part in the funding round.
In 2016 Paystack secured $1.3 million seed investment from international and homegrown investors including Tencent and Comcast Ventures, according to Forbes.
The lead investor in this round is Stripe, and that investment means that Paystack can count among their investors a company with a huge footprint in the U.S. market.
In fact, half of Americans who bought something online in 2017 did so from a business whose payment was processed by Stripe, according to Bloomberg.
Nigerian fintech startup Paystack enables online payments across Africa, overcoming many of the barriers businesses face in terms of accepting payments online.
The startup, with an office in San Francisco, graduated from Y Combinator in 2015, and was the first Nigerian company to be invited by the Silicon Valley-based incubator.
Since it was launched in 2015 by Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi, Paystack’s all-African team has grown to process nearly 15 percent of all online payments in Nigeria, powering tens of thousands of businesses of all sizes including telecommunications firms, airlines, and government agencies, according to ITNewsAfrica.
Paystack provides APIs to help developers quickly 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 much more.
The company’s payments interface allows customers to pay with local and international cards, or directly from their bank accounts, while the startup also supports localized payment channels, including mobile money and QR code payments.
Paystack will invest the new round of funding in scaling its engineering team, further deepening its payments infrastructure, and accelerating its expansion across the continent.
