Fintech firm secures 1.3 million dollars in seed funding

segun akande

December 19, 2016 12:14 PM

The investment will go towards building teams and growing sales and marketing operations.

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Fintech solutions company, Paystack, founded by Ezra Olubi and Shola Akinlade, has raised 1.3 million dollars in funding from local and international investors.

This year, Paystack made our five biggest moments in tech as one of the first Nigerian companies to get into Ycombinator. In that time, they put their platform through its beta stage and raised 200,000 dollars in early-stage funding from the incubator.

Paystack owes a big part of its success to Ycombinator and that belief in their future has been motivated by their immense prospects.

The growth potential for fintech is enormous. Nigerian businesses collected about 150 billion dollars last year, most of which was collected offline. However the digital economy on the continent is growing fast, and Nigeria alone currently sees six million new Internet users every year.

Such a high proportion of payments are still conducted offline, but with more people coming online every year, the growth trajectory is staggering.

Paystack launched its beta in January and in less than a year, they have processed over one billion naira in payments. They are already working with iROKO, Jobberman, PayPorte and Hotels.ng and most recently, built an online paments gateway for one of the world’s biggest e-commerce companies, Shopify.

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According to the co-founder, Shola Akinlade, the company intends to use its newest batch of funding to build out its engineering team, grow its sales and marketing operations and accelerate product development.

They understand that there’s a real problem with online payment solutions in these parts and want to be equipped well enough to fix it.

Since they became operational in Nigeria, Paystack has begun conversations in Ghana with plans to support a few more countries in 2017. The guys see building solutions for the whole of Africa as a fundamental part of their growth strategy; the rest of the world can come later.

segun akande