Raba Partnership has led a $2.1 million seed round for Thepeer, an African tech infrastructure startup that connects businesses’ wallets. The announcement comes one year after the company acquired $220,000 in pre-seed funding from a group of angel investors, including Paystack CTO Ezra Olubi and Edenlife CTO Prosper Otemuyiwa.
RaliCap, Timon Capital, BYLD Ventures, Musha Ventures, Sunu, and Uncovered Fund are among the participants in Thepeer’s seed round. Chipper Cash and Stitch, both African fintechs, also participated.
“I made a purchase from a vendor and couldn’t pay after using several apps and couldn’t move money from one wallet where I had cash to another,” said CEO Kosisochukwu Chike Ononye. “After we launched our first product [Send], we went back to the drawing board because there were things we needed to get right. In that process, we discovered more consumer and business problems.”
With the money, the startup intends to roll out additional features and wallets in other currencies (its present platform only supports Naira wallets), as well as hire additional expertise and engage in product development.
Read also Ghanaian Credit Fintech Fido Raises $30M Series A Round, Backed By Israeli Investor
Why The Investors Invested
Thepeer reports that its monthly transaction volume has increased by 161% on average since its introduction. With the debut of Transmit, a new product aimed at allowing businesses send money to one another via its dashboard (as opposed to the consumer-facing dashboard), the company’s monthly transaction volume has increased by over 65 times to “eight figures” million.
“Thepeer’s move to unify Africa’s wallet ecosystem could be likened to how Flutterwave entered the fragmented card and mobile money payments space in 2015. With the proliferation of consumer and B2B fintechs across Africa, Thepeer is building a foundational API-based payments layer where fintechs can enable money movement natively from within their respective wallets and apps. We are incredibly excited to support this ambitious team building a next-generation network,” Raba Partnership founder, George Rzepecki, said in a statement.
Thepeer adds to the extensive line of African fintech investments made by Raba Partnership, a Cape Town, South Africa-based venture capital firm. Raba is a well-known backer of infrastructure ventures such as Flutterwave, Yoco, Stitch, Axis Pay, and OnePipe. Although it has invested in consumer platforms such as Thndr and Djamo, it is most recognised for its support of Flutterwave, Yoco, Stitch, Axis Pay, and OnePipe.
Read also Nigerian B2B Marketplace Betastore Raises $2.5M To Help Informal Businesses With Stock-Outs, Funding
A Look At What The Startup Does
Thepeer, founded in August 2021 by Kosisochukwu Chike Ononye and Michael ‘Trojan’ Okoh, provides infrastructure for primarily small and medium-sized fintech enterprises.
Thepeer asserts that its APIs provide an alternative network where fintechs and enterprises may incorporate a variety of goods into their applications and websites to facilitate clients’ money transfers.
Customers of businesses that interact with Send’s APIs, such as Eversend (a cross-border fintech) and Nguvu Health (a teletherapy platform), can send money across both platforms using identifiers such as email addresses or usernames.
After Send, Thepeer teamed with Flutterwave, the startup whose API gateways for mobile wallets and bank accounts are the most extensive in Africa, and built on its platform to expand its reach. The partnership has enabled the company to introduce two additional B2B2C products, Direct charge and checkout.
Direct Charge enables clients of approximately 15 businesses to fund their wallets with funds from one another. Here is how it operates. As a user of Nguvu Health, there are various ways to fund a wallet, such as credit cards and bank transfers. Thepeer is an additional alternative. Therefore, when Nguvu Health users select Thepeer, they have the option of integrating any of the 15 wallets with their Nguvu Health wallet and initiating a direct charge transaction.
Read also South African Payments Startup Talk360 Raises $4M Seed Funding Round
However, checkout functions similarly on websites for businesses such as online grocery and clothes stores. Thepeer appears as a checkout option for online shoppers and allows users to pay using Bitsika, Eversend, Chipper Cash, and Paga wallets.
Thepeer API Thepeer API
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexperts.com/view_expert/charles-rapulu-udoh