Payourse, a crypto startup located in Lagos that creates user-friendly products and solutions to help Africans accept cryptocurrency, has received a $600,000 pre-seed investment to help it scale its products, employ more people, and expand into other markets.
Micheal Ugwu, one of Africa’s largest NFT collectors, Flori Ventures, Olumide Soyombo’s Voltron Capital, and Allegory Capital are among the investors in this round. CELO co-founders Marek Olszewski and Rene Reinsberg, Kola Aina of Ventures Platform, Angel Touch Holdings, and Oluwatobi Anisere were among some of other angel investors that took part.
“This new funding will help us improve our existing use-cases and then build more as we extend into new markets and accelerate crypto adoption on the continent,” said Bashir Aminu co-founder and CEO.
Why The Investors Invested
The startup has acquired considerable traction since it was founded. Coinprofile, the company’s first product, was introduced in September 2019 and now has over 5,000 customers who process millions of dollars on the platform, according to the company. Payourse further stated that its payment gateway grew 15,000 percent across all measures in 2021, with a monthly growth rate of 150 percent.
“I worked closely with Bashir as a visiting Partner at Flori Ventures. I’ve spent 4 batches at YC and rarely do I see a company with this kind of knockout performance and a founder who is willing to put in the hard work to continue to nurture it.” Holly Liu, Visiting Partner at Flori Ventures, said. “Bashir is capable of meeting the demands of a crazy growth startup and also ramp up fundraising.”
Voltron Capital’s Managing Partner, Olumide Soyombo, also spoke about their investment in Payourse.
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“We are excited to back the Payourse mission as we believe this team is a super technical team with subject matter expertise. The team is solving an important problem by providing the key infrastructure for Africans and African businesses to adopt crypto,” he said.
A Look At What The Startup Does
Payourse, founded in September 2019 by Bashir Aminu (CEO) and John Anisere (CTO), is addressing the challenge of Web3 economy accessibility and adoption by delivering the basic infrastructure and technologies that enable African businesses to create user-friendly crypto and Web3 products.
While working at Busha, another Nigerian crypto firm, Aminu had the concept for Payourse. The original plan was to create a basic platform that would collect wallet addresses and then generate shareable links, which he shared with Anisere, a front-end engineer colleague.
However, according to the CEO, when developing a number of web3 tools and APIs to support the Coinprofile product, it became clear that they had not only created a wonderful financial product, but also infrastructures powerful and flexible enough for other businesses to incorporate, build, and prosper on.
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As a result, the company announced last month that all of its current and future products will be consolidated under one parent company, Payourse. Wallets, remittances, and liquidity are the three key features that power the parent company’s infrastructure.
The company also stated that it has begun developing use cases to demonstrate its desire to power the next hundreds of crypto-enabled businesses. Simpa, for example, is a simple and quick no-code platform that allows anyone to instantly build a completely configurable crypto exchange in minutes.
Payourse intends to ensure that individuals can build no-code crypto products, similar to how they can build web apps on the Bubble platform without writing a single line of code. They’ve already started with Simpa, with more to come.
Following the Central Bank of Nigeria’s recent prohibition on crypto trading bank accounts, Payourse has partnered with various companies that give liquidity (Fiat currencies like the Naira) anytime someone executes a transaction on its Peer-to-Peer marketplace. Payourse’ s partners receive the signal and complete the transactions within minutes after the crypto transfer has been made.
“We make money from the little exchange margin we make from our liquidity partners on every transaction. This way, everybody wins,” said Aminu.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer