Nigeria and Finland-based ZirooPay announced that its has raised $11.4 million to scale its POS operations across Nigeria. The fundraising was led by by Lagos-based VC fund Zrosk Investment Management.
Other participants include private and institutional investors like Nordic venture fund Inventure, Fedha Capital, Exotix Advisory and individual investors like Petri Kivinen, the former managing director at Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Renaissance Capital; Abiodun Ajai, the director, Sub-Saharan Africa of Bank of America; and Jonas Dromberg, former Bureau chief at Bloomberg
ZirooPay (owned by IroFit technologies) provides POS terminals for payment in Nigeria. According to the company, it currently has over 15,000 merchants using its POS terminals and mobile application and these merchants have processed $500 million — a 5,000% increase within three years — across 10 million transactions.
The company says the funds would be used to expand its payment infrastructure, accelerate growth and grow its team. It will also expand its product suite and include additional payment channels and options in a bid to build out an omnichannel system for merchants.
Related story: IroFit Won $10,000 in the Ecobank Fintech Challenge
According to CEO Omoniyi Olawale, there are two key differentiating factors that ZirooPay has over its competitors:
- its in-house technology which they have a patent for that allows the company process POS transactions in real time without internet connection;
- the multi-functionality of its POS terminals which provides other functions apart from payment processing. Its mobile application allows small businesses across the retail, agency banking, hospitality and services sectors to perform other tasks like tracking sales and managing business operations.
According to Samson Esemuede, the managing director and chief investment officer of Zrosk, “The growth in the online economy of the African continent has been remarkable; however, the offline economy is orders of magnitude larger than the online economy.
“ZirooPay has a patented technology advantage (that works without an internet connection) and distribution model that significantly increases the odds of digitizing the offline economy at a unit cost that makes the story particularly compelling. The payment space has become well-resourced and competitive, but the white space we see in the digitization of cash is the reason we are optimistic about the outlook for this investment.”
