Moment, a Cape Town-based fintech, has closed $22 million to deepen its network, enhance its platform and accelerate expansion across Africa.
The Series A funding round was led by AlphaCode Venture Partners, with follow on investment from General Catalyst, MultiChoice, and participation from Canal+. This raise adds Moment’s sum total raised to $55 million to help it build its payment infrastructure businesses across Africa.
“Africa’s payment complexity has long been a hidden tax on commerce on every business trying to grow here, and on every household trying to participate in the digital economy. Moment is dismantling that barrier in a way we haven’t seen before: at continental scale, compliantly, and with a product that the market’s largest enterprises have already validated,” said Dominique Collett, General Partner at AlphaCode Venture Partners. “We’re backing Joel Yarbrough, Moment’s CEO and his team as they build a defining piece of Africa’s financial infrastructure.”
Offering both payment collection and revenue retention solutions to corporate and enterprise merchants, Moment offers billers and merchants such as insurers and subscription platforms an unrivalled suite of collection tools including recurring payments, customer outreach tools, failed payment recoveries across digital and in-person channels, and the ability to directly link Moment to their enterprise billing systems.
Africa’s payment landscape is notoriously fragmented. In South Africa, over two-thirds of payments are still made in person at retail locations despite high bank penetration. In Nigeria, instant bank transfers dominate, with strong competition from cash, cards, and digital wallets. In other markets, mobile money platforms have thrived due to low bank penetration, but are fragmented across dozens of operators, with no single provider able to offer merchants unified collections across all channels.
Moment lets their customers pay with any locally preferred payment method, spanning cards, mobile money, real-time bank transfers, eWallets, recurring bank debits, and in-person payments.
“Within three years of launch, we are processing for 10 million people a month across some of Africa’s leading brands. We support the full spectrum of locally preferred digital payment methods as well as an in-person acceptance network spanning over two million physical locations,” said Moment CEO Joel Yarbrough. “Our platform is highly resilient and we process 600,000 transactions a day despite power and connectivity problems that plague the market. We’ve built a platform that can deliver on the particular challenges of the African market and help businesses get paid faster and at lower cost.”
By optimising subscription and instalment payments, adding new locally preferred collection methods across Africa, and integrating intelligence into its reconciliation and back-office clearing capabilities, Moment ensures merchants can confidently collect anywhere while getting their money faster than ever before.
