Flutterwave, a San Francisco and Lagos-based payments firm has closed a $35m to boost its market share and expand across Francophone and North Africa in its efforts to connect merchants in Africa.
Flutterwave provides easy and reliable payment solutions for businesses around the globe and has processed 100 million transactions valued at over $5.4 billion for global leaders including Uber and Booking.com.
Flutterwave co-founder and CEO, Olugbenga “GB” Agboola said, “We’re helping businesses in Africa and globally accept payment and to scale by being the payment technology that connects Africa to the world. We have built a technology infrastructure that is steadily being recognized as the bridge to connect the payment system. We are excited to be working with our newest commercial partners, Visa and FIS, and investors to build the dominant payments platform in Africa.”
The firm has also signed commercial agreements with Visa and FIS. The deal with FIS will allow it to offer the Flutterwave solution as part of Worldpay from FIS payment solutions to its merchant clients in Africa. Flutterwave is a 2016 graduate of the FIS FinTech Accelerator program.
While on the other hand, the deal with Visa will allow it to scale its consumer payments service, Barter, through Visa’s QR code payments, card issuance, and global payment processing channels to over 85,000 businesses already on its platform. These deal with Visa aims to connect African consumers to the rest of the world with Visa and give them access to digital commerce.
With this funding, Flutterwave will continue its journey of facilitating payments for businesses and being the go-to payments platform for merchants, banks, and consumers.
“Commerce across the African continent is quickly moving online. Flutterwave is powering this transition by introducing modern payment infrastructure to Africa’s merchants while also creating the ability for global companies to reach over 1 billion African customers,” says Will Szczerbiak, Principle at Greycroft. “We have supported the company since investing in their 2016 seed and are excited to lead the Series B after seeing over 500% revenue growth in 2019.”
Joe Saunders, a member of the Company’s board and the former CEO of Visa. “We’re excited to continue to lend our support to this exceptional team of founders. GB and his colleagues have not only identified but continue to successfully and thoughtfully execute upon, a once in a generation opportunity in commerce and payments for the emerging markets of Africa.”