South Africa: Flood raises further $2.5m
Flood secures $2.5m seed round to speed market entry and boost telco partnerships
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Flood, a superapp-as-a-service platform, has raised a further $2.5 million in seed funding to expand its operations. The funding, backed by CRE.vc and angel investors, follows a successful $1 million round in July 2024, and will be used to accelerate market entry and expand Flood’s partnerships with telcos and challenger banks while supporting the rapid onboarding of thousands of offline merchants.
Founded by serial entrepreneur André de Wet, Flood has gained traction in South Africa, India, and the Maldives, and is set to officially launch across a range of markets later this year.
“95% of retail in emerging markets is still offline,” says De Wet. “Flood bridges that gap by embedding localised commerce, loyalty and payments directly into the apps people already use, such as telco and banking platforms.”
Flood delivers a white-label superapp-as-a-service that allows telcos and banks to instantly embed digital commerce tools into their own applications. End users don’t have to download new apps to shop, earn loyalty rewards or make digital payments, instead they access everything through trusted platforms they already use.
“CRE is excited to continue to support Flood as it executes one of the most compelling platform theses we’ve seen in emerging markets,” says Pardon Makumbe, founder and managing partner at CRE. “The promise of e-commerce has remained largely unfulfilled in emerging markets due to deep structural barriers. The economics simply don’t work: fulfilment costs routinely exceed average basket sizes, and the infrastructure required to sustain traditional e-commerce models (like centralised warehouses and last-mile logistics) is expensive, slow to scale, and often out of reach. As a superapp enabler, Flood offers a modular platform that empowers telcos, banks, and developers to launch vertically integrated commerce ecosystems by providing the infrastructure layer underneath. Through deep partnerships with telcos, challenger banks, and public platforms, Flood embeds digital commerce, loyalty, and payments directly into the apps people already use every day.”
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