Flutterwave Lands More Than $40M In VC Funding To Expand

Flutterwave, the FinTech startup, announced news on Wednesday (Aug. 2) that it has raised more than $10 million in a Series A venture capital (VC) funding round.

In a blog post, the company said Greycroft Partners and Green Visor Capital led the Series A funding round. Existing investors, including Y Combinator and new investor Glynn Capital, also participated in the VC round. The company said the new venture capital money will be used to hire more talent, build out its global operations and fuel rapid expansion of its organization across Africa.

“Over a year ago today, we founded Flutterwave to build underlying payments infrastructure for African businesses to accept card, mobile money and bank account payments in a single place. Without this payments infrastructure, it was impossible for African businesses to scale acceptance of digital payments. Today, the results of our work in enabling rapid growth for African businesses speak for themselves; $1.2 billion in payments processed. Over 10 million transactions. Ten Bank Partners across Africa. All in just a little over a year of operations,” the company said in the blog post.

The company said the next chapter is to build a global mobile payments technology company that changes how the world does business with Africa. This is why it said it is partnering with Greycroft Partners, Green Visor Capital, Glynn Capital and Y Combinator  —  the same teams that helped fund and build global online payments giants like Braintree, Stripe, Xoom, Square and Visa.

“At Flutterwave, we believe that as software eats the world, the digital economy will increasingly become the new global economy. On the internet, anyone can build a global business from anywhere. Yet, for Africans doing business in the digital economy, it is so much harder than it needs to be. Only about 3 percent of adults in Africa report having a credit card.”

What’s more, the company said global technology companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon can’t do business across Africa because they are unable to accept more popular local mobile payment methods like bank accounts and mobile money. Only 4 percent of African businesses accept online payments, noted Flutterwave.