Flutterwave, an African fintech startup graduated from Y Combinator S16 batch that allows businesses to make and receive payments has secured $35M investment in Series B round. The funding round was led by e.ventures and Greycroft in participation with Visa, Green Visor Capital, Golden Palm Investments, FIS, Endeavor, CRE Venture Capital and 9Yards Capital. After this round, Flutterwave’s total funding amount has raised to $64.5M.
In 2016, while having seed round, they started offering a payment infrastructure that businesses could integrate with by using their API.
Later during 2017 & 2018, they raised $20M (collectively) in Series A and Series A Extension rounds. By that time, they had processed 100M transactions of payments worth $2.5B and also had partnerships with Uber, Booking.com, TransferWise and Flywire in Africa.
But now, Flutterwave is not just a payment processing API but a complete payment platform. Whether you want to add a checkout process to your website or want your own store to sell and accept payments, Flutterwave has complete built-in solutions for you. You can even create and manage custom virtual cards, send invoices to customers and more using Flutterwave. With current Series B announcement, Flutterwave has also announced their partnership with Worldpay allowing them to also accept payments from Africa.
With the funding, Flutterwave will invest in technology and business development to grow market share in existing operating countries, CEO Olugbenga Agboola — aka GB — told TechCrunch. The company will also expand capabilities to offer more services around its payment products.
“We don’t just want to be a payment technology company, we have sector expertise around education, travel, gaming, e-commerce, fintech companies. They all use our expertise,” said GB. That means Flutterwave will provide more solutions around the broader needs of its clients.
“Our business goes beyond payments. People don’t want to just make payments, they want to do something,” he said. And Flutterwave aims to offer more capabilities toward what those clients want to do in Africa.
“If you are a charity that wants to raise money for cancer research in Ghana, or you want to sell online, or you’re Cardi B…who wants to do concerts in Africa…we want to be able to set up payments, write the code and create the platform for those needs,” GB explained.
That also means Flutterwave, which built its early client base across global companies, aims to serve smaller African businesses, including startups. Current customers include African-founded tech companies, such as moto ride-hail venture Max.ng.
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