Adedapo Adesanya
By Adedapo Adesanya
An African payments company, PawaPay, has secured a $9 million seed fund from investors which include the Nigerian-Ghanaian music star, Tosin Ajibade, otherwise known as Mr Eazi.
The round was co-led by MSA and UK-based investment fund 88mph, with participation from Vunani Capital, Kepple Ventures and Mr Eazi’s Zagadat Capital.
The capital will be deployed to scale the United Kingdon based company’s operational presence, find more talent to join the team and expand into new markets on the continent.
Founded in 2020, PawaPay started off from online sports betting company, betPawa, and is focused on the mobile money infrastructure provided by telecommunications companies (telco) in Africa.
The company seeks to challenge the problems facing payments in Africa made difficult by large unbanked populations, declined credit card transactions, charge-backs, fraud, dropped and lost payments and slow cross-border settlements.
However, through PawaPay’s simple application programming interface (API), merchants can access more than 300 million customers in more than 10 markets and enjoy seamless, transparent and highly reliable payments.
With the single API, PawaPay’s customers can access all telco mobile money systems and thus receive and send payments to hundreds of millions of people.
PawaPay handles local operations, compliance, regulatory cover and bank accounts, making it as simple as clicking a button to start receiving payments in a new market. It is already successfully handling millions of transactions on its rails per week and has operations in 10 countries.
Commenting on the funds secured by the company and its growth prospects, Mr Nikolai Barnwell, CEO of PawaPay said, “We’re making a bet that this infrastructure will continue to grow and offer a superior experience than traditional financial infrastructures such as card and banking.
“With more than 500 million registered users on the continent, 200 million of which are active frequent users, this isn’t a fringe fad or a stepping stone to cards and swift payments. This is an example for the rest of the world of how payments could – and should look.
“Most of our competitors are largely focused on bank and card payments, but over the past many years, we have been laser-focused on addressing the unique set of challenges that accompanies specializing in mobile money.
“I think this gives us a good position to explore the opportunities that are coming up as this alternative financial infrastructure continues to grow.
“We are excited to have world-class investors supporting our vision to connect every mobile money wallet in Africa to each other, and the rest of the world, as we continue to make it simpler to do payments.”
Mr Kresten Buch, founder of 88mph, added “When we first invested in Africa in 2010, one of the key drivers was that mobile money was a superior payment method to credit and debit cards when used for online payment.
“So, we are excited to be an investor in PawaPay’s journey and continue to witness the development of digital infrastructure in Africa.”
On his part, Mr Eazi stated that, “Being investors hugely focused on Africa and very familiar with the landscape, we believe that mobile money-focused fintech is not just one of the most exciting places to invest but also one of the most important bridges to ensuring financial inclusion of the billions of people across the continent, the kicker for us was that we believe in the clear mission, vision and strategy and we are confident that the PawaPay team is the best team to achieve it.”
