Revio Raises $5.2 Million to Grow Africa-Focused Payments Orchestration Platform

Revio, a payment orchestration platform, secured $5.2 million in a seed round to tackle the challenges and opportunities in the African payment ecosystem.

The funding will be used to expand Revio’s coverage across Africa, enhance its routing logic, and attract talent from the continent and key international markets, the company said in a Tuesday (Sept. 26) press release. Revio has secured partnerships with four of Africa’s largest insurers, two major telcos and an African bank.

“With this funding, we are excited to double down and unlock new adjacent opportunities for value creation for our growing base of clients,” Revio Co-founder and CEO Ruaan Botha said in the release.

The African payment landscape presents unique obstacles due to its fragmented nature, with more than 280 licensed payment service providers, 42 currencies and diverse consumer payment cultures, according to the release.

Revio aims to address these challenges by simplifying payment operations through its single payment application programming interface (API) and orchestration platform, the release said.

The company’s Africa-focused payment orchestration platform aspires to minimize the complexity, cost and risk of payment operations for merchants, per the release. Through a single platform and API, merchants gain access to over 70 payment methods, customizable routing and retry rules, and customer engagement throughout the payment journey.

Revio’s funding round was led by QED Investors and saw participation from Partech and Revio’s existing investors, Speedinvest, RaliCap and Everywhere VC, according to the release.

“We have a strong conviction that payments in Africa hasn’t been fully solved,” Gbenga Ajayi, partner and Africa lead at QED Investors, said in the release. “Revio is building a platform that can unlock increased eCommerce and digital payment activity on the continent and help both global and local merchants reach new customer segments.”

PYMNTS Intelligence found that payments orchestration helps businesses meet the rising consumer demand for a growing array of seamless digital payments. By leveraging connections with multiple payment services, payments orchestration allows merchants to scale quickly and support new geographies, partners, business models and customers, according to “A Primer on Payments Orchestration: What It Is — and Is Not,” a PYMNTS and Spreedly collaboration.