Nigerian fintech company Paystack announced that it has raised $1.3 million in a seed investment round from both international and homegrown investors, Finextra reported.
The fintech arm has secured the investment from Tencent, Comcast Ventures and Singularity Investments, along with participation from Spark, M&S Partners, Tokyo Founders Fund, Blue Rinc Capital, Pave Investments, Michael Siebel, Justin Kan, among other Angels.
The company plans to utilize the investment in order to build its engineering team in Lagos and also improve its sales and marketing operations. It will also use it to accelerate product development and customer onboarding.
“Having painstakingly identified the many barriers that merchants on the continent have when it comes to online payments, we have built and refined a product for Africa that we hope will act as a catalyst for the continent’s online economy, be it on-demand services, e-commerce, travel & hospitality, financial services or entertainment. We know Africa’s digital economy has potential, we simply need to unlock it and make businesses work better, faster and more effectively. Paystack will do this,” Shola Akinlade, CEO of Paystack said. “Thanks to the backing from our investors with today’s announcement, and our time spent with Y Combinator, we are now in the strongest position yet to resolve the disconnect between African businesses and accepting payments.”
The company has just moved out of beta that was opened in January and has partnered with Nigeria’s top platforms, such as iROKOtv, Jobberman, Payporte, and Hotels.ng. It plans to build its list of homegrown companies, as reported by Forbes in an interview.
Paystack is the first Nigerian tech company to be accepted into the famous Y Combinator program. The company connects all multi-channel payment options with merchants across the country, enabling them to accept payments from around the world, via credit card, debit card, and direct bank transfer on web and mobile. It recently built payment gateway integration for e-commerce platform Shopify.
