Apis Partners - Afrikan Heroes

Peach Payments Secures US$31M in Series A Funding, Led by Apis Partners

April 4, 2023

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.

Udayan Goyal, Apis Partners Co-Founder and Managing Partner

“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.

“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.

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.

South Africa’s Maltento Raises $788k to Revolutionize Protein Production from Organic Waste

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

A Month After Investing In TymeBank, Apis Partners Quits African Payments Company Tutuka Holdings

April 4, 2021

Private equity fund manager Apis Partners has sold all of the shares it indirectly held in South Africa’s Tutuka Holdings, a payments aggregator active in Africa. Its shares (62.6%) which it owned through its investment fund Apis Growth Fund II were sold for an undisclosed amount to SaltPay, a payment solutions provider focused on European SMEs.

*Udayan Goyal, Partner and Co-Founder of Apis Partners*

“We are delighted that SaltPay has identified Tutuka as an asset to its own business as it seeks to provide an end-to-end solution to its customers around the world. Adding this essential component to the SaltPay product offering will bring significant benefits to all of its stakeholders, ”commented Udayan Goyal, Partner and Co-Founder of Apis Partners.

Here Is What You Need To Know

Apis, which is withdrawing from Tutuka after 2 years of investment, claims to have contributed to the growth of this physical and virtual payment card issuing company, which operates in 33 emerging countries.

The fund manager says he has enabled Tutuka to develop its international presence and especially to strengthen its clientele.

It was in September 2019 that Apis Partners joined Tutuka’s funding round by buying back the shares of Paycorp.

The manager had thus offered himself a majority stake in the capital of this company which counts among its customers, the South African telecoms operator MTN.

At that time, Apis was motivated by the mobile ecosystem which, according to its estimates, should grow by more than 45% per year until 2021.

The company recently led a $110m round in South African digital bank TymeBank, alongside JG Summit, one of the largest and most diversified Filipino conglomerates.

A Look At What Apis Partners Does

The firm supports growth stage financial services and financial infrastructure businesses in Africa and Asia by providing them with growth equity capital. A majority of the firm’s portfolio companies are mainly fintech companies which are based in South Africa, Kenya, India, Malaysia, Singapore and other parts of Asia. In 2020, one of its portfolio companies, Kenya’s DPO Group, a leading, high-growth online commerce platform in Africa operating across 19 countries, was acquired by Network International, a leading enabler of digital commerce across the Middle East and Africa (MEA). The deal was a landmark for the African payments space.

“Apis focuses on driving financial services, with the help of innovation and technology, as a cornerstone of building better lives for people across the world. This was the key driver that pushed us to start Apis,” said Apis Partners founders Matteo Stefanel and Udayan Goyal.
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

Apis Partners Tutuka Apis Partners Tutuka