Africa’s payment landscape is fragmented, with many operators offering different payment options. This leads to payment failures due to invalid cards, inactive accounts, and high dispute rates.
Revio, a South African payment orchestration startup, is working to address this challenge. CEO Ruaan Botha started Revio after seeing how much time and effort businesses spend collecting payments across different providers and dealing with outstanding and failed payments.
“Digital payments in Africa are growing rapidly, projected to reach $146 billion in 2023, before accounting for nearly $500 billion in mobile money transactions,” Botha said. “However, there are unique challenges and opportunities in how payments are made and collected on the continent. The most glaring is the highly fragmented payments ecosystem, with over 280 licensed payment service providers, 42 currencies, and unique consumer payment cultures.”
The two-year-old startup helps companies streamline their order-to-cash lifecycles and deal with the challenges of using multiple payment options through its APIs. It recently raised $5.2 million in seed funding to tackle failed payments, which cost digital businesses billions in recurring revenue each year.
This is Revio’s second round of funding in the past 12 months. In November, it raised $1.1 million in pre-seed funding from investors including Speedinvest, Ralicap, and Everywhere VC. These investors participated in the QED-led seed round, along with growth-stage pan-African VC Partech.
The participation of QED and Partech, which are typically known for their growth-stage investments, in Revio’s seed round is a testament to the relevance of its product, according to co-founder and COO Nicole Dunn. (Partech Africa invests in Series A and B deals, and this is QED’s first seed check in an African startup after Moniepoint’s pre-Series C round and Remedial Health’s Series A round.)
“I think it’s a great signal for the ecosystem, not only for us but hopefully to the rest of the ecosystem. This should also encourage some of those investors that had committed to investing in Africa and started deploying before the downturn to follow the example that QED set by coming early into a seed round, even in this current market, especially in an African context.” said co-founder and COO Nicole Dunn.
