South Africa’s Revio, a payment orchestration platform that helps merchants optimise their order to cash lifecycle, has announced a seed investment round of US$5.2 million to help it expand across Africa and expand its capabilities.
Revio is an Africa-focused payment orchestration platform that minimises the complexity, cost, and risk of payment operations, to help merchants reach and retain more customers. Its single PCI-compliant platform and API allows global and local merchants to access more than 70 payment methods, set up configurable routing and retry rules, and dynamically engage customers throughout the payment journey.
The startup raised US$1.1 million in seed funding late last year, and has now added another US$5.2 million in capital to that. The funding round was led by leading fintech fund QED Investors, which was joined by Partech and continued participation from Revio’s existing investors – Speedinvest, RaliCap, and Everywhere VC.
Revio plans to use the capital to further grow its coverage across Africa, deepen its routing logic, and expand its capabilities to add more value to customers. The company will be scouting for top talent across the continent and in key international markets to support its growth.
“Digital payments are growing rapidly across Africa, projected to reach US$146 billion in 2023, before taking into account US$500 billion in mobile money transactions,” said co-founder and CEO, Ruaan Botha. “However, there are unique market challenges and opportunities in how payments are made and collected on the continent. The most glaring is the immense fragmentation of the payments ecosystem, with more than 280 licensed payment service providers, 42 currencies, and the unique consumer payment cultures that exist.”
On top of that, a large majority of the consumer base is still coming online, and does not have high discretionary incomes, forcing them to closely control their cash flow, added co-founder and COO Nicole Dunn.
“The result is that both local and global merchants struggle to reach customers and collect revenue, with high cost of customer acquisition, painful and complex integration processes, and high rates of payment failures,” she said.
Gbenga Ajayi, partner and Africa lead at QED Investors, said his firm had a strong conviction that payments in Africa hadn’t been fully solved.
“Revio is building a platform that can unlock increased e-commerce and digital payment activity on the continent, and help both global and local merchants reach new customer segments. We are excited to back the exceptional team that has proven they can execute even in tough market conditions, and localize very strongly to win enterprise customers,” he said.
