Nigeria-based fintech startup, Flutterwave, raises $35m; plans entry into francophone and North Africa

Lagos-based fintech startup, Flutterwave, announced that it has closed a $35m Series B funding round. The round was co-led by Grey Croft & eVentures with additional participation from CRE Ventures, Fidelity National Information Services Inc (FIS), Visa, Green Visor and Endeavor.

Olugbenga Agboola, Co-founder and CEO of Flutterwave, in an email to Innovation Village, said that the company will use the funds to provide innovative solutions to make and receive payments seamlessly.

“As always, our goal remains the same, we will continue to connect Africa to the rest of the world by making sending and receiving payments as frictionless as possible for banks, businesses and individuals,” he adds.

2019 was indeed an exciting year for the company. It processed $5.4 billion across 107 million transactions. That’s over two times the transaction count for 2018. It also officially launched in South Africa, bringing its total number to TEN African countries. It also now has over 86,000 small, medium and enterprise businesses sending and receiving payments through Flutterwave on a daily basis.

Agboola also said that this year, the company is planning to expand into regions like Francophone and North Africa. With this expansion, this means that the company is present in all the regions in Africa.

Another exciting news about this funding round is that the participation of FIS makes Flutterwave the payment provider for Worldpay in Africa. World Pay was a payment processing company acquired by FIS in 2019 for about $35 billion. As at the time of the acquisition, neither company had any presence in Africa.

According to Agboola in a discussion with Techcrunch, “With this partnership, any Worldpay  merchant in Europe or the U.S. can accept any African payment. If someone goes to pay Netflix  with an African card, it just works.”

Another notable investment is that of Visa. This is its first buy in to Flutterwave, with which it joined last year on a consumer payment platform called GetBarter that allows individuals to make payments to one another across borders.

As part of the latest funding round, Flutterwave will scale up and expand that service, allowing it to issue physical and virtual Visa cards and process payments using Visa’s networks.

Last year, the startup integrated with the Alipay platform such that Flutterwave merchants can accept or install Alipay as a payment type to accept payments from its billion users.

This recent funding brings the company’s total investment to $55 million; including the $10 million fund raise in 2017 and another $10 million in 2018