Stitch, a South African fintech startup, has raised $4 million in a seed round from an impressive global investor lineup as it prepares to expand across the continent.
Stitch was founded by Kiaan Pillay, Natalie Cuthbert, and Priyen Pillay with the goal of providing full API access to financial accounts across Africa, starting with South Africa. Developers can connect apps to financial accounts using its API. Users can share their transaction history and balances, confirm their identities, and make payments using this feature.
The startup has now raised a seed round of $4 million, which it claims is the largest investment in a pure-play African fintech infrastructure company to date, as well as one of the continent’s largest seed-stage fintech payments raises.
Stitch’s seed round, which was co-led by firstminute capital and The Raba Partnership and includes CRE, Village Global, Klarna founder Niklas Adalberth through his fund Norrsken, Venmo founder Iqram Magdon Ismail, Plaid founding team members, and executives from Coinbase, Revolut, and Fast, attracted a stellar group of investors.
Flutterwave founder Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, through his fund Future Africa, and Paystack are among the African fintech leaders in the investor cohort. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Bezos are among the investors of Village Global.
Stitch will utilize the funds to expand its staff, solidify its South African development, and begin operations in West and East Africa, giving Africa’s burgeoning fintech sector the tools they need to create better products faster.
“It makes no sense that we’re still building financial services the same way we did 15 years ago,” said Kiaan Pillay, Stitch co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO).
“There’s an incredible opportunity to provide a new generation of financial services in South Africa and across other African markets. At Stitch, we enable smart people in the ecosystem to unlock this potential and build amazing products and services, powered by our infrastructure.”
Venmo founder and Stitch shareholder Iqram Magdon Ismail said companies that drastically advance the infrastructure of basic needs are very important.
“Stitch is building the solution that will unlock value for all banks and financial institutions in Africa,” he said.
Brent Hoberman, co-founder and general partner of firstminute capital, said Africa has the fastest growing developer community globally.
“Stitch has the opportunity to become the core infrastructure enabling digitisation in the financial services industry across the continent. Every online business in Africa can now easily embed fintech capabilities in their applications – facilitating online payments, increasing lending capacity and streamlining KYC and identity checks – through the Stitch API,” he said.
“As a fellow South African, I’m excited to be partnering with a team of exceptionally talented local engineers with pan-African ambitions.”