Paystack secures $8m Series A Funding

Paystack, a Nigeria-based startup providing payments tools to businesses in Africa, has raised $8 million in Series A Funding.

The round was led by Stripe, and includes Visa, follow-on funding from Tencent and Y Combinator, as well as angel investors Tom Stafford (Managing Partner at DST Global), Gbenga Oyebode (founding partner of Aluko & Oyebode and Board member of MTN Nigeria), and Dale Mathias (Co-founder, Innovation Partners Africa).

This brings Paystack’s total investment to date to more than $10 million.

Existing investors include Tencent, Y Combinator, Comcast Ventures Catalyst Fund, Blue Haven Ventures, and Ventures Platform.

Within a little over two years, Paystack’s all-African team has grown to process nearly 15% of all online payments in Africa’s largest economy, powering tens of thousands of businesses of all sizes including telcos, airlines, and government agencies.

Paystack provides powerful APIs to help developers quickly build modern payments experiences online. With only a few lines of code, developers can create custom checkout experiences, build automated recurring billing systems for subscription products, instantly send bulk transfers to any bank account in Nigeria, verify the identity of customers through five different verification APIs, and much more.

Through the company’s sleek payments interface, customers can pay with local and international cards, or directly from their bank accounts. Paystack also supports localized payment channels, including mobile money, QR code, and USSD payments.