Announcing Paystack’s $8 million Series A Round

Hi everyone - this is Shola (Paystack CEO) with an exciting community update :)

Yesterday - August 28 - we announced that Paystack has raised $8 million in Series A funding. The round was led by payments leader Stripe, and was joined by global payments company Visa, with follow-on investment from Tencent and Y Combinator. 

We’re also excited to welcome on board angel investors Tom Stafford (Managing Partner at DST Global), Gbenga Oyebode (founding partner of Aluko & Oyebode and Board member of MTN Nigeria), and Dale Mathias (Co-founder, Innovation Partners Africa)!

This brings the total investment we’ve raised to date to a little over $10 million.

I’d like to share what this means for you, our customers, and for the future of our company.

Our next stage of growth

In 2016, we announced our seed round of $1.3 million to make it easier for businesses in Nigeria to get paid. Two years later, Paystack serves over 17,000 businesses, processing over 15% of all online payments in Nigeria. To put things in perspective, our monthly processing volumes have grown 30 times since we announced our seed round in Dec 2016.

We’ve introduced a steady cadence of innovations into the market, including recurring billing, automated chargeback resolution, and customer insights. And all this with a small but mighty team of 29 incredible people.

In 2018, we started to plan for what comes next. 

Our Series A will go towards building out our payment infrastructure even further and expanding across Africa. And as Paystack looks to expand rapidly across the continent, we’re thrilled to have the benefit of the deep expertise of Stripe, Visa, and Tencent.

In 2017, Bloomberg reported that half of Americans who bought something online in the past year did so from a business whose payment was processed by Stripe, while Visa - a household name - is a key part of the fundamental infrastructure that makes global commerce possible.

It’s no exaggeration to say that together, these companies are some of the planet’s most knowledgeable domain experts in payments, and we can’t wait to leverage their deep insight on behalf of businesses across Africa. We know that the payments problems on our continent is far from solved, but with this infusion of capital, and with backing from global payments leaders, we believe we’re in the strongest position to fix them.

As a Paystack merchant, you can expect accelerated access to technology that previously quite literally wasn’t available on the continent. You can expect local, regional, and global payment channels that make it ridiculously easy to get paid by customers anywhere in the world. And beyond payments, you can expect a whole suite of new tools to help you acquire, retain, and engage customers.

In summary, Paystack’s next step is to become a complete growth engine for modern businesses in Africa, enabling new business models, and to be an amplifier helping you grow and scale.

Why Paystack Exists

Paystack’s mission is to help businesses in Africa be profitable, envied, and loved. Today, we do this primarily through a modern payments platform that helps thousands of businesses accept online and offline payments quickly and securely.

Every week, our team collectively speaks to hundreds of business owners. These businesses - our customers - operate in a wide number of industries, and at different scales, from airlines and telcos, to Instagram stores and side hustles. But every single one of them is eager for growth, and Paystack exists to provide them the tools to run and scale massively successful businesses.

Hearing the stories and dreams of our customers inspires me everyday. We all know that building a business in Africa is hard, but it is also increasingly clear that there’s a new generation of innovators who, against all odds, are building amazing businesses across the continent. We are obsessed with building the infrastructure and tools to allow them thrive.

Thank you

In our 2017 end of year review, we said:

Paystack shouldn’t exist.

Two geeks with no institutional backing and no formal financial training had no business sticking their nose into fintech. And yet here we are, two years later, held up quite literally by thousands of hands.

I look around and I marvel at the adventure that this has been. 

Paystack - the company, and the portfolio of phenomenal companies we serve - is a joyful rebuke against the idea that you must look a certain way or be a certain way to succeed in the world.

Thank you to everyone who has helped us hold up the flag for business in Africa. Thank you to existing investors who have been unwavering in your support. Thank you and welcome aboard to new investors who believe as intensely as we do in building bridges between Africa and the global economy. 

Thank you to my co-founder Ezra and our incredible team, who perform miracles daily, and who must now continue to write the rulebook in as many languages as there are on the continent. Thank you to the incredible African technology ecosystem that has supported us in ways too numerous to mention.

And above all, thank you, always and forever, to the 17,000 businesses who’ve entrusted us with your business. Words fail to describe the overwhelming appreciation I feel for you, and how much the Paystack team is rooting for you.

Our promise to you is that we’ll build the tools that will give you every opportunity to start and scale a business that is profitable, envied, and loved.

Thank you.

Onwards.

✊🏿❤️