The UK-based asset manager, Apis Partners LLP, has announced its intention to invest €29M ($31M) in Baobab Payments GmbH, trading as Peach Payments. The investment is subject to the approval of the Competition Commission of South Africa and customary procedural and closing conditions. Peach Payments is the second largest online payment gateway in South Africa, with activities in Kenya and Mauritius, and a staff complement of nearly 150 international professionals.
Peach Payments has achieved remarkable growth in recent years, with revenue increasing by more than 650% since 2020, and 80% in 2022 alone. The company plans to use the funds to expand across new African markets, deepen its product offering and reinforce its core merchant value proposition.
“Peach Payments, one of Africa’s most exciting high-growth businesses with a relentless focus on technology and operational leadership, is at the forefront of enabling next-generation payments for merchants across the continent. We are excited to partner with Peach Payments’ fantastic team and look forward to leveraging Apis’ capital, expertise and global network to support new investment in the startup’s infrastructure, products and people to consolidate the company’s recent gains and support the next phase of growth,” says Udayan Goyal, Apis Partners Co-Founder and Managing Partner.
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“As an ESGI-native investor, Apis Partners’ sector expertise will help Peach Payments to maximise financial inclusion by enabling more merchants to participate and grow in today’s increasingly digital global economy,” says Matteo Stefanel, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Apis Partners.
“At Peach Payments, our mission is to enable African businesses and entrepreneurs to succeed in digital commerce. We want to be the infrastructure layer they build their business on. This was our original vision when we started, and is more relevant today than ever,” says Rahul Jain, Co-Founder and CEO, Peach Payments. “We’ve witnessed incredible growth in the past three years driven by fundamental forces and shifts in consumer and business adoption of digital commerce.”
The company provides a toolkit that enables merchants to accept, manage and make payments via mobile and the web. Services offered include online payment acceptance, pay-outs (disbursements), and subscription solutions across a variety of payment types including cards, electronic funds transfer, digital wallets, mobile money, and Buy Now Pay Later options, among others. The company’s goal since it was founded has been to be the online payment infrastructure provider that helps businesses scale. In achieving this goal, the business has focused on its merchants’ customers as much as the merchants themselves.
“Peach Payments is known for delivering enterprise-grade products, high end-user conversion, best-in-class risk management, and actionable insights, backed by the best customer support experience on the continent, to its merchants,” says the company.
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Peach Payments was founded in Cape Town, South Africa in 2012 by Rahul Jain and Andreas Demleitner, offering a payment gateway to local online merchants. The company expanded to Kenya in 2018 and to Mauritius in 2021.
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