Paystack, Nigeria’s answer to Stripe, has raised $8 million in a Series A funding round led by Stripe and joined by Visa, Tencent and Y Combinator, according to finextra.com. Like Stripe, Lagos-based Paystack provides APIs that let merchants, with just a few lines of code, build online payment features.
In two years, the all-African team has developed five APIs, enabling developers to create online custom checkout experiences, build automated recurring billing systems, instantly send bulk transfers to any bank account in Nigeria, and verify the identity of customers.
Paystack now processes nearly 15% of all online payments in Africa’s largest economy, powering tens of thousands of businesses of all sizes including telcos, airlines, and government agencies.
Having secured financial backing of some othe biggest payments players in the world, the startup now plans to expand across Africa, build out its infrastructure and grow its engineering team.
Shola Akinlade, CEO, Paystack, says: „As Paystack looks to expand rapidly across the continent, we’re thrilled to have the benefit of the deep experience of Stripe, Visa, and Tencent. Our ambition is to give African merchants the tools and services they need to go toe-to-toe with the best businesses in the world, and win.”
Patrick Collison, CEO, Stripe, adds: „The Paystack founders are highly technical, fanatically customer oriented, and unrelentingly impatient. We’re excited to back such people in one of the world’s fastest-growing regions.”
Founded in 2015, Paystack comes out of beta in January 2016. In July 2017, Paystack introduces the ability for customers to pay with only a bank account number and, for the first time, Paystack processes over NGN 1 billion (~$3 million) in a single month.
August 2018 key figures for Paystack:
17,000+ Live merchants, 1,000,000+ Payments collected, $20,000,000+ Paid out to merchants.
Paystack is entirely designed and built in the dynamic, entrepreneurial city of Lagos!
Banking 4.0 – „how was the experience for you”
„So many people are coming here to Bucharest, people that I see and interact on linkedin and now I get the change to meet them in person. It was like being to the Football World Cup but this was the World Cup on linkedin in payments and open banking.”
Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
