REasy, a payments startup focused on African small and medium-sized importers, has closed a $1.8 million pre-seed round to speed up its mission of simplifying cross-border payments for SMEs. The round brings together a strong coalition of early-stage backers, including Launch Africa Ventures, 54 Collective, Ingressive Capital, Digital Africa, Cameroon Angels Network, Dakar Network Angels (DNA), Techmind, and several international business angels.
Beyond the funding, REasy says it has achieved a regulatory first: co-designing with the Bank of Central African States (BEAC) the region’s first foreign exchange framework tailored for importing SMEs. The new rules enable small businesses to make compliant, instant international payments—even for amounts below $10,000—a threshold that often traps importers in slow, manual processes or pushes them toward informal channels. By aligning regulatory clarity with modern rails, REasy argues the framework will unlock a more transparent, fluid, and inclusive trade environment across Central Africa and, eventually, beyond.
At the heart of REasy’s product is a bridge between local payment methods—such as Mobile Money, bank transfers, and cash deposits—and global rails including Alipay, WeChat Pay, UnionPay International, and traditional wire transfers. That duality allows an SME to initiate a payment in familiar local rails while the supplier receives funds in a preferred global method, with full traceability, compliance, and speed. It’s a design decision aimed at the daily reality of African importers: fragmented payment options, currency rules that are hard to navigate, and settlement paths that can stretch weeks.
The company says thousands of importers already use REasy to pay overseas suppliers and secure their goods more reliably. For many, a typical transaction starts with a small restock—often under the $10,000 mark—where minutes matter for inventory turns and seasonal demand. By shortening the time between invoice and settlement, REasy claims it can reduce working-capital strain and cut logistics lags that erode margins.
The new capital will be used to expand REasy’s geographic footprint, strengthen its technology stack, and deepen regulatory foundations along key trade corridors. That roadmap includes further integrations with financial institutions and regulators, expanded risk and compliance tooling, onboarding automation, and richer merchant dashboards for reconciliation and documentation. In parallel, the company plans to broaden currency coverage and payout options to meet supplier preferences across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
REasy’s pitch is deliberately simple: an African entrepreneur should be able to pay an overseas supplier without excessive fees or unnecessary delays. By coupling regulatory collaboration with practical rails and clear documentation, the startup aims to bring the convenience consumers enjoy in domestic digital payments to the far more complex world of business-to-business trade.
While the pre-seed round is modest by global standards, it targets a sharp, underserved pain point where incremental improvements in cost, reliability, and speed can translate directly into higher margins and faster inventory turns for small businesses. If REasy can continue pairing policy innovation—like the BEAC framework—with robust compliance infrastructure and partner distribution, it stands to become a vital node in Africa’s cross-border commerce stack.
