Africa-focused fintech Startup, TerraPay Raises $9.6 m From Prime Ventures, IFC, and Partech

TerraPay announced today that a consortium of investors, including Prime Ventures, Partech Africa and management acquired the company for an undisclosed sum. In addition, the same investors, joined by IFC, invested $9.6 million in TerraPay to fund the company’s expansion.

TerraPay, a company incubated by Comviva, the India-headquartered mobile solutions provider, provides Payment Infrastructure Services that help more people around the world to transfer money quickly, safely, and affordably.

The company does this by enabling payment service providers such as banks, mobile money operators, money transfer operators or other payment providers to instantly connect to each other at a low cost. Since its start in 2015, TerraPay has acquired more than 25 licenses to operate in over 60 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe and is expanding globally.

Ambar Sur, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of TerraPay, said: “We believe in our mission to address financial inclusion by making real-time national, regional and global payments accessible to everyone. We are excited by this validation from our marquee investors, and look forward to growing rapidly and reaching most of the world’s underserved in the coming years.”

TerraPay management developed the fintech company to address the pain points people in many countries experience when trying to make payments across different channels. The cost to send money to and from emerging countries, especially in Africa and Asia, are some of the highest globally, averaging 9.3 per cent compared to the global average of 7 per cent, yet remittances are a major contributor to the GDP of recipient countries. A large portion of the remittance cost is related to cash handling at the sending and receiving end. At the same time, the digital payment ecosystem is fragmented with many mobile money providers developing their own network alongside financial institutions with no real interoperability solution.

TerraPay is a game-changer because it connects MTOs, mobile money networks and financial institutions to a simple, central platform where all payment players can reliably connect to any financial network, facilitating a seamless end-to-end customer payment experience.

TerraPay’s Payments Infrastructure opens the possibility to include merchants traditionally excluded from credit card systems, allow companies to pay salaries through mobile money accounts and help banks to settle remittances in real-time.

Pieter Welten, a partner at Prime Ventures said: “We identified TerraPay as an attractive investment opportunity. Led by a strong and experienced management team, TerraPay has a unique market position and strong economic moat comprising of licenses and regulatory approvals, a world-class digital payments platform and global network of partners. Our investment should allow the company to further expand and scale its operations.”

Paulo de Bolle, IFC’s Global Director, Financial Institutions Group, said: “By adding TerraPay to IFC’s growing fintech investment portfolio, we are supporting the company to grow and expand, while helping to lower the costs and streamline the process to send money home. Fintechs like TerraPay play a vital role in increasing financial inclusion in emerging markets.”

“We are excited to join efforts with an outstanding group of investors and a superb team for the next part of TerraPay’s journey,” said Cyril Collon, General Partner at Partech Africa. “We have been impressed by the cutting-edge platform TerraPay’s teams have developed. This platform will play a key role in reaching the interoperability goals necessary for true financial inclusion. The impact for end-customers is already massive in terms of quality of service, reliability and speed.”

Since its inception, the TerraPay founders focused on: (i) developing a robust, scalable and agile tech platform; and (ii) compliance and the acquisition of payment intermediary and money transfer licenses. TerraPay has built partnerships with global money transfer companies including Western Union, Visa, Xpress Money, MoneyTrans, Paga, Ria, Instant Cash, Ripple and MoneyGram.

Manoranjan Mohapatra, Chief Executive Officer of Comviva said: “We have been proud to be part of the progress that TerraPay has made over the last five years. The driving philosophy of all our incubations is to create significant value for our customer, community, shareholders and employees. The solutions we invest in should create value within the Comviva enterprise, or grow on their own to achieve their product vision; while generating worthwhile value for the shareholders. TerraPay’s forward path is in alignment with that underlying purpose.”

TerraPay has been advised by the FinTech M&A team of specialized investment bank Kempen & Co and the FinTech/M&A team of the Dutch full-service law firm Van Doorne, led by Friso Foppes.