An African Fintech company PawaPay has raised $9 million in seed financing from a round which was co-led by MSA and UK-based investment fund 88mph, with participation from Vanani Capital, Kepple Ventures and Mr Eazi’s Zagadat Capital.
The capital was deployed to scale PawaPay’s operational presence, recruit more talent to the team to strengthen its mobile payment solution and expand into new markets on the continent.
Founded in 2020, PawaPay is a subsidiary of online betting platform; it is focused on mobile money infrastructure provided by telecommunications companies (telco) in Africa.
PawaPay enables mobile payments for local and international transactions/financial activities by integrating data from Africa’s major telco’s into one mobile money API.
Each telco in each country provides its own unique mobile money product, which makes the mobile money infrastructure as a whole-across borders and Telco’s-highly fragmented and opaque. But through PawaPay’s simple API, merchants can access more than 300 million customers in more than ten markets and enjoy seamless, transparent and highly reliable payments.
Announcing the development on Monday, Nikolai Barnwell, CEO of PawaPay said, “Africa’s alterative financial infrastructure is in an exciting phase with double digits everywhere. And mobile money has come out as the de facto money infrastructure for hundreds of millions of people on the continent”.
“We are excited to have word-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”.
In a separate remark, Oluwatosin Oluwole Ajibade, popularly known as Mr. Eazi, singer and founder of Zagadat Capital said, “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’re confident that the PawaPay team is the best team to achieve it”, he said.
