African Fintech, PawaPay, Secures $9m Investment From Mr. Eazi, Others

PawaPay, a pan-African payment startup, has secured $9 million in a seed round that saw participation from Mr Eazi's Zagadat Capital and others.

The funding round was co-led by MSA and UK-based investment fund 88mph, and other participants were Vunani Capital, Kepple Ventures.

The capital will be deployed to scale pawaPay’s operational presence, find more talent to join the team, and expand into new markets on the continent.

According to pawaPay’s CEO Nikolai Barnwell, pawaPay was built to help people send and receive money internationally using mobile money.

“We’re making a bet that this infrastructure will continue to grow and offer a superior experience than traditional financial infrastructures such as card and banking,” Barnwell said in a statement.

Founded in 2020, pawaPay is focused on the mobile money infrastructure provided by telecommunications companies (telco) in Africa. Each telco in each country provides its own unique mobile money product, which makes the mobile money infrastructure as a whole – across borders and telcos – highly fragmented and opaque.

For merchants, this fragmentation means that it is unnecessarily expensive to use and frustratingly unstable. Through pawaPay’s simple API, merchants can access more than 300 million customers in more than ten markets and enjoy seamless, transparent and highly reliable payments.

PawaPay’s customers are large Pan-Africa/global merchants and companies needing to make payments to African consumers’ accounts. Payments in Africa have long been made difficult by large unbanked populations, declined credit card transactions, charge-backs, fraud, dropped and lost payments, and slow cross-border settlements.