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Yoco, a South African fintech serving 200,000 small and independent businesses, has secured a $100 million credit facility from Victory Park Capital (VPC), a US-based alternative investment firm specialising in private credit and asset-backed finance.
The money will fund Yoco Capital, the company’s embedded finance arm, which provides flexible, automated funding to Yoco’s merchants.
Yoco has been advancing capital to South African entrepreneurs since 2018 in partnership with dedicated small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) credit providers, disbursing more than R6.5 billion (about $397 million at the current exchange rate) in working capital to over 40,000 merchants.
Advances range from R2,000 (about $122) to R1.5 million (about $91,700).
“We’ve spent a decade building an operating system that runs a merchant’s whole business, payments, point of sale, and now the decisions in between. Financing was the one layer we didn’t fully control. This facility changes that,” said Carsten Holtkemeyer, chief executive officer of Yoco.
“Yoco has a proven track record of supporting the operating needs of small and independent businesses,” said Jason Brown, senior partner at VPC. “We’re supportive of Yoco’s mission to expand access to flexible financing solutions for South African entrepreneurs.”
Yoco is one of the 15 businesses featured in How we made it in Africa II: Real stories of entrepreneurs turning opportunity into profit, a book by our editor-in-chief, Jaco Maritz. The book is available here.
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