Newly Funded Flutterwave Becomes WorldPay’s First African Partner

Silicon Valley and African FinTech startup Flutterwave closed a $35 million fundraising round and announced partnerships with WorldPay and Visa as it plans expansion on the continent, according to reports on Tuesday (Jan. 21). 

Capitalizing on Africa’s growing payments market, Flutterwave will serve as the African payment provider for Worldpay’s clients. The Visa partnership means Flutterwave can issue physical and virtual cards and process payments using the network.

The Series B funding round was co-led by Greycroft & eVentures with additional participation from VISA, CRE Venture Capital, FIS and Green Visor, Forbes reported. The company said it will use the funding toward expansion efforts in northern and Francophone Africa. This latest funding brings Flutterwave’s total investment to $55 million.

Launched in 2016 by Nigerians Iyinoluwa Aboyeji and Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, the FinTech startup is headquartered in San Francisco. Flutterwave enables clients to tap its application programming interface (API) as well as facilitate cross-border payments for African companies.

“For us at Flutterwave, we have been focused on enterprise clients and now we are going to deepen that and also show how we can help small businesses scale their business when they use us as their payment partner,” said Agboola, the firm’s chief executive, in a Reuters report.

Flutterwave said it has processed 107 million transactions worth $5.4 billion, up from 14 million transactions in 2017 worth $1.5 billion. Existing customers include Uber, Booking.com and Jumia, according to its website.

“We don’t just want to be a payment technology company, we have sector expertise around education, travel, gaming, e-commerce, FinTech companies. They all use our expertise,” GB Agboola told TechCrunch.

“We have built a technology infrastructure that is steadily being recognized as the bridge to connect the payment system,” Agboola said in a statement.

In July, Flutterwave partnered with Alipay to enable the Chinese payments firm to offer digital payments with African merchants. The integration gives Flutterwave’s 60,000-plus merchants access to over 1 billion Alipay users. Flutterwave will earn revenue by charging its typical 2.8 percent on international transactions.