Nigerian fintech company raises funding from four investors
Nigerian fintech company Wallets Africa has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Mozilla Corporation, 9Yards Capital, Samurai Incubate, and Michael Seibel, Y Combinator CEO. They join Maria Alegre, CEO of Chartboost; Microtraction; Venture Souq; and Brad Flora who have previously invested in the company.
Wallets Africa provides a digital financial platform that makes it easier for Africans and visitors to the continent to transact with an app and a card.
Founded in Lagos, Nigeria in 2018, founder and CEO, John Oke hatched the Wallets Africa idea two years earlier while still a software engineer at SureGifts, a gift voucher company. While integrating the company’s core backend with Kenya’s mobile money service, M-Pesa, he noticed the seamless payment possibilities available for both. One could make use of a SureGifts voucher to pay at an M-Pesa till at a mall or to get tickets at an IMAX cinema in Nairobi. Thus, this realisation led him to believe that financial transactions via digital wallets were possible and could be adopted in Nigeria.
The company’s various products currently span across several packages, including one for consumers, which allows them to, in addition to making payments on international platforms such as Netflix and Amazon, pay bills, buy airtime, use a card for purchases and make money transfers to banks in Nigeria as well as mobile money transactions in Ghana and Kenya. The company’s business product allows small business owners and startups to manage their transactions from an intuitive dashboard.
Wallets Africa’s growing user count stands at 43,000 over 1,400 businesses signed up. The startup also handles more than ₦3 billion ($6.7 million) in transactions monthly.
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