Pan-African payment solutions provider Bizao announced an 8 million euro ($8.2 million) series A funding round Thursday (Jul 21).
The round was led by AfricInvest Financial Inclusion Vehicle (AfricInvest FIVE), Adelie and Seedstars Africa Ventures. The new capital will be used to accelerate Bizao’s growth across the African continent and to develop new products and services.
Launched in 2019, Bizao facilitates the processing of end-to-end payment flows to and from the main digital payment systems in Africa. Within 3 years, Bizao expanded its footprint to 10 African countries: Burkina-Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal, Tunisia, Togo and Gabon.
On the latest news, Aurélien Delort-Duval, founder and CEO of Bizao said, “this round of financing will enable us to design new product lines for high-potential vertically integrated organizations, expand in new markets and grow the team across all our offices”
Omar Bekkali, a partner at AfricInvest, added, “Bizao provides an adequate response to the deficient infrastructure of interoperable payment schemes in Africa, enabling affordable access to a broad range of transactional financial services for the benefit of underbanked populations as well as small and medium-sized enterprises.
He continued that Bizao’s “ambition to connect and converge different payment channels (mobile wallets, debit cards and airtime) […] is in line with the high-impact strategy of the AfricInvest-FIVE vehicle aiming to foster financial inclusion in Africa through equity investment in financial institutions, including banks, insurance companies and high-potential fintech companies.”
Echoing Bekkali, Jean-Manuel Costa, managing partner at Adelie said, “mobile money has enabled more than 60% of the population on the continent to finally have access to basic financial services […], we are convinced that a platform combining all these payment methods has an exceptional growth potential.”
Up and down the continent of Africa, FinTechs are looking to address the challenge of financial exclusion to develop solutions for Africa’s underbanked populations.
For example, as PYMNTS has reported, Dopay is seeking to change the way Egyptians get paid by decreasing the emphasis on cash through a dedicated online banking app for the Egyptian market.
Read more: FinTechs Resolve Banking Barriers, Empower Egypt’s Unbanked With Mobile Technology
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