Nigerian owned and San Francisco based payment startup Flutterwave has announced it secured over USD10 million from Greycroft Partners and Green Visor.
The company that provides a payment platform that makes it easier for banks and businesses to process payments in local currencies across the African continent said the new capital will be used to hire more talent, build out its global operations and fuel rapid expansion of the organisation across Africa.
In a statement sent to ‘Flutterwave Community’ the company stated that, “Over a year ago today, we founded Flutterwave to build underlying payments infrastructure for African businesses to accept card, mobile money, and bank account payments in a single place. Without this payment infrastructure it was impossible for African businesses to scale acceptance of digital payments.”
According to Andrew Torre, Group Country Manager, Visa Sub-Saharan Africa, the region’s future economic growth in entangled with electronic payments. This is in view of the fact that roughly two-thirds of the adults on the African continent remain unbanked and card penetration is low. Yet, a Mckinsey Gallup data showed 54 percent of adults in sub-Saharan Africa make one or more long-distance payments in a given month, totalling approximately 5 billion transactions annually.
Torre stated that only by improving access to electronic payments and financial services in general, will companies be able to play a part in helping more people contribute actively to robust, sustained economic growth, improve their lives.
Iyinoluwa Aboyeji left Andela a year ago – a Nigerian-based Africa focused company he co-founded with three others, with a team of engineers, entrepreneurs and ex-bankers to build Flutterwave. Today, the company says it has processed USD1.2 billion in payments across 10 million transactions.
In a recent interview, Aboyeji stated that the company’s drive was to enable majority of people in Africa to lead good lives using technology.
“We are peering 15-20 years into the future and saying, “What do we have to do to save the world?” When you have a situation where a majority of people who live in the world are excluded from the prosperity of software, that is not good for the future of the world,” Aboyeji told CNN tech.
The company said it is not resting on its laurels but is only just beginning its journey of building a global payments technology company that changes how the world does business in Africa.
Flutterwave which graduated from Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley elite accelerator program is partnering with Greycroft, Green Visor, Glynn Capital and Y Combinator, the same teams that are behind global payments giants like Braintree, Stripe, Xoom, Square and Visa.
“At Flutterwave, we believe that as software eats the world, the digital economy will increasingly become the new global economy. On the internet, anyone can build a global business from anywhere. Yet, for Africans doing business in the digital economy, it is so much harder than it needs to be,” the company’s statement read.
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