SA Fintech Startup Stitch Secures $4-million

Over the years, there has been a growing trend of fintech infrastructure players around the world. In Africa, a handful of startups have launched in the past three years to provide such services. Stitch, a South African fintech startup, is one of them; and today, it is coming out of stealth and announcing its seed round of $4-million, and this makes it the largest round raised by any API fintech startup in Africa at the moment.

The secured $4-million in a seed round of funding was co-led by firstminute capital and Raba along with several other global investors including the founders of Venmo, CRE, Village Global, Klarna founder Niklas Adalberth Klarna, Flutterwave, the founding team from Plaid and Revolut and Paystack

The funding will be used to expand the startup’s team and launch its operations in West and East Africa. According to reports, this is the largest investment to date in a pure-play African fintech infrastructure company and one of the largest seed-stage fintech investments raised in Africa. 

Stitch

Founded by  Kiaan Pillay, Priyen Pillay and Natalie Cuthbert, the ground-breaking startup offers API access to bank accounts in Africa with a lightweight single Sign-On experience. Essentially, the startup provides a service that enables its clients to connect their apps to user’s financial accounts, reducing the technical and operational effort. 

Kiaan Pillay, co-founder, and CEO of Stitch provides insight into the startup.

“It makes no sense that we’re still building financial services the same way we did 15 years ago. There’s an incredible opportunity to provide a new generation of financial services in South Africa and across other African markets. At Stitch, we enable smart people in the ecosystem to unlock this potential and build amazing products and services, powered by our infrastructure.” 

In addition, the Stitch API aims to make it easier for African fintech developers to create new and unique products. According to the startup, Developers are able to connect apps to financial accounts in record time, this allows their users to share their transaction histories, balances, confirm their identity and initiate payments. The innovative technology developed by Stitch can enable personal finance, lending, insurance, payments, wealth management.