South African Revio raises $1.1 million in seed round

South African API payment and collections company, Revio, announced that it has raised $1.1 million in a seed funding round led by SpeedInvest, joined by RaliCap Ventures, The Fund, and Two Culture Capital. Other participants in the round include Sequoia, Quona Capital, and Circle Payments. This is Revio’s first institutional funding round since emerging from stealth in March 2021.

According to reports, 2-3 out of every 10 payments in Africa fail. Reasons for this include the fragmented payments landscape, higher dispute rates, invalid or expired card details, false-positive fraud checks, multiple or dormant accounts, and insufficient funds. This high failure rate results in billions of dollars in lost revenue. In Africa alone, an estimated $14 billion in recurring revenue is uncollected each year, and the continent has a 320% higher churn rate than mature markets.

Founded in 2020 by Ruaan Botha, Revio helps businesses collect more revenue, through reducing payment failures and recovering lost revenue. Through a single API, Revio brings transparency to merchants’ payment stacks and optimize their revenue operations, to increase customer retention and lifetime value. It claims to be the first African payments platform focused on payment failures and revenue recovery.

Revio says the funding will be used to launch new products, expand the team, and enter new emerging markets, all contributing to Revio’s mission of reducing payment failures and churn.

“Revio is building a category-leading product to enable businesses to better manage their cash flow and accelerate growth. The African payments landscape is fragmented, and we believe they will play a critical role in contributing to the growth of subscription commerce and companies with pan-African scale.”

Hayden Simmons, Partner at RaliCap Ventures

Today, businesses can integrate with Revio’s API to seamlessly accept and reconcile 20+ payment methods across 25+ African markets, to increase their payment success rates and automate revenue operations. Based on the insight that ‘there’s more to getting paid than accepting payments,’ Revio offers:

• Smart payment routing and failover to increase payment success rates
• Configurable auto-retries, dunning rules, and proactive card expiry management
• Data-driven interactions to recover lost revenue, including secure payment links, self-service billing changes, and options to settle arrears in cash at a nearby retailer
• Real-time analytics and reporting to optimise recovery processes

Revio says that it has landed 50+ customers and processes thousands of transactions monthly just over one year of operations. These clients are usually involved with recurring revenue businesses and high transactional volumes and they span from large-scale enterprises, mid-market corporates, to fast-growing scale-ups across multiple industries.

“Revio’s leadership team has bold ambitions and deep industry experience, which is a powerful combination. They have attracted some of the best talent in the market and are executing at pace. We are excited to be investing at this inflection point in their journey.”

Scott Hartley, Co-founder and Partner at The Fund

“Having been part of multiple payment orchestration and billing automation platforms across the world, we can see the incredible potential of using this toolset to increase revenue recovery for businesses in a region where three out of ten payments fail. With a team as experienced as Revio’s at the helm of tackling this massive opportunity we’re convinced that they can fundamentally change the payments landscape for businesses in their target markets and are excited to be backing them on that journey.”

Alvaro Perezcano, FinTech Investor at SpeedInvest.

Revio’s ambition is to operate in about 13 African countries in the next 18 months, but focus on three or four large markets. And then, get enough traction that it can take on to other emerging markets like Latin America.