Flutterwave raises $10 million to build underlying unified payments infrastructure for African businesses
Flutterwave, the payment company founded by Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, has just raised over $10 million in a series A funding round. Flutterwave is building underlying unified payments infrastructure for African businesses to accept card, mobile money, and bank account payments. In a year of operation, Flutterwave has garnered 10 banking partners across Africa and processed over 14 million transactions worth $1.5 billion in the last 12 months.
Greycroft Partners and Green Visor have led a Series A funding round of over $10 million in Flutterwave. They will be investing alongside existing investors like Y Combinator and new investors like Glynn Capital. The new capital will be used to hire more talent, build out our global operations and fuel rapid expansion of our organization across Africa.
Over a year ago today, Flutterwave was founded to build underlying payments infrastructure for African businesses to accept card, mobile money, and bank account payments in a single place. Without this payments infrastructure it was impossible for African businesses to scale acceptance of digital payments.
Today, the results of our work in enabling rapid growth for African businesses speak for themselves; $1.2 billion in payments processed. Over 10 million transactions. 10 Bank Partners across Africa. All in just a little over a year of operations. Together with you — our community, our investors, our customers, our supporters, our partners and our family — we have built one of the fastest growing payments companies of all time. From Africa.
For a normal company, now would be the time to rest on our laurels, pursue trends and focus on milking our value chain for easy profit. Fortunately, we are not that kind of company. Africa needs us to keep doing the hard things.
The next chapter for us at Flutterwave is building a global payments technology company that changes how the world does business with Africa. This is why we have partnered with Greycroft, Green Visor, Glynn Capital and Y Combinator — the same teams that helped fund and build 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.
Only about three percent of adults in Africa report having a credit card. Global technology companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon can’t do business across Africa because they are unable to accept more popular local payment methods like bank accounts and mobile money. Only 4% of African businesses accept digital payments. Without global payments infrastructure a business in Kibera, Nairobi cannot scale across Africa and around the world.
Flutterwave’s global payments solutions will make it easier for Africans to participate in the digital economy so you can make and accept payments for whatever you want, in whatever currency or payment method you want, across the globe. If we are successful, we might just inspire a new generation of Africans to flip the question from “what more can the world do for Africa?” to “what more can Africa do for the world?”.
I will end with the words of Dr Kwame Nkrumah, a Pan-African hero who greatly inspires us at Flutterwave.
“Divided, we are weak. United, Africa could be the greatest force for good in the world.”