Ruaan Botha - Afrikan Heroes

South African Fintech Revio Raises $5.2M to Simplify African Payments

September 28, 2023

Revio, a South African fintech startup, has recently secured $5.2 million in seed funding. The investment amount, $5.2 million, came from a group of investors that includes Speedinvest, Ralicap, Everywhere VC, QED, and Partech. The intention behind this investment is to strengthen Revio’s efforts in addressing the fragmented payment landscape in Africa. Revio was founded by Ruaan Botha, who currently serves as the co-founder and CEO. The startup is focused on payment orchestration, streamlining the order-to-cash lifecycles for businesses in Africa. It connects businesses to over 70 payment methods and service providers, aiming to reduce payment failures that cost digital businesses billions in recurring revenue yearly.

Why The Investors Invested

The investors’ decision to commit funds to Revio can be attributed to several key factors. In the first place, the rapid growth of digital payments in Africa is a compelling market opportunity. With a projected value of $146 billion in 2023 and significant mobile money transactions, Africa presents unique challenges and opportunities in the payments space. Revio’s focus on addressing the fragmentation of the payments ecosystem, with over 280 licensed payment service providers and 42 currencies, aligns with the growing demand for payment solutions in this diverse market.

Again, Revio’s approach to payment orchestration is essential for businesses operating across multiple countries and accepting various payment methods. The need for such platforms is evident, as they simplify the complex process of handling payments and increase payment success rates. Revio’s API-driven approach offers merchants access to transaction routing, automated failover, real-time customer engagement workflows, and even a revenue recovery use case that addresses payment failures due to insufficient funds or abandoned authorizations.

Moreover, the participation of investors like QED and Partech, known for their growth-stage investments, in Revio’s seed round reflects the recognition of the startup’s product relevance and potential impact. This move sets a positive signal for the African startup ecosystem, encouraging early-stage investments even in challenging market conditions.

A Look at Revio

Revio is a relatively young startup, founded just two years ago. Ruaan Botha, the co-founder and CEO, leads the company. While Revio is based in South Africa, its reach extends beyond its home country to serve businesses across more than 25 African markets. The startup focuses on assisting companies in connecting to multiple payment methods and reducing payment failures, particularly targeting large-scale enterprises with complex payment needs.

The core value proposition of Revio is its ability to streamline the order-to-cash lifecycle for merchants. Through its API, it enables businesses to access a wide range of payment methods, facilitating transaction routing, automated failover, and real-time customer engagement workflows. Additionally, Revio’s innovative approach includes a revenue recovery use case, which leverages communication channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications to re-engage consumers and provide more convenient payment options.

Revio has seen remarkable growth, with a 1,000% increase in revenue over the past year. Its client base includes some of Africa’s largest insurers and telecom companies, such as Old Mutual, MTN’s aYo, Innovation Group, and Standard Bank. Looking ahead, Revio plans to target global retailers servicing the African market and expand its capabilities in cross-border reconciliation settlement. The recently secured capital will be instrumental in advancing the company’s technological capabilities and expanding its team, both locally and internationally. In conclusion, Revio’s mission is to address the ongoing challenges in the African payment landscape and unlock increased e-commerce and digital payment activity on the continent.

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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

eVuna, South Africa’s startup launches insight crowdsourcing platform for brands

October 24, 2020

South African startup eVuna has launched an insight crowdsourcing platform that enables a sponsor to digitally connect with an audience, either known or unknown, and rewards the audience for their engagement. Launched in September, eVuna uses rewards to gamify the engagement experience in order to get closer to audiences, better understand their needs, and entrench brand or business loyalty.

“Global events are drastically changing how people perceive value in products, services and brands. New regulations, macro changes in trends, and globalisation of services are forcing changes to organisations, and the need exists for empirical data from target audiences to make decisions,” Ruaan Botha, co-founder of eVuna, said.

“The current method of getting closer to their audience insights is to “buy data” or pay marketing corporations hefty amounts to manually source insights on their behalf. These manual insight gathering exercises are typically small sample sizes that lead to an expensive “per interaction” price. It also takes lots of time to setup and can dure for extended periods of time.”

eVuna, however, allows brands and businesses to engage with target audiences in real-time, digitally and with no middleman, and fairly reward the participants. Self-funded so far, eVuna has already signed up three large financial services brands who will use it to engage with customers, but also to better engage with staff and contractors.

“We have seen multiple customers interested in doing a POC, which is a perfect fit as the platform allows engagements from sample sizes as small as 50,” Botha said.

Currently operating in the FMCG, HR and financial services industries, eVuna can however be integrated into the customer journey in any service industry, rewarding customers for giving feedback on their experience.

“The platform has been built to play well with any alternative rewards programme, allowing it to easily expand into other countries, with a specific focus on emerging economies,” said Botha.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry