Nigerian Startup, Flutterwave Seals Partnership with WorldPay and Raises $35m Series B Funding
Nigerian fintech startup, Flutterwave has started the year with an impressive development. The startup has secured $35 million in a Series B round of funding led by Greycroft Partners and eVentures. Visa, Green Visor and African fund CRE Venture Capital are other participants.
This follow up investment brings its total investment to date to about $55 million, having raised $20 million in Series A funding rounds in 2017 and 2019 with Greycroft, Mastercard and other firms taking part in it.
This further paints an impressive prospect for the Nigeria-based company which reportedly processed $5.4 billion across 107 million transactions in 2019 – double what it processed in 2018.
With this new funding, Flutterwave plans to invest in technology especially the expansion of its developer team. It also looks to hire more business development staff to further develop its business and grow its market share in the 10 countries where it currently operates.
The startup also plans to ‘offer more’ services around its payment products – providing more solutions that meet the needs of its clients in their various sectors beyond just payments
“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.”
Olugbenga Abgbola, CEO, FLutterwave.
Launched in 2016 by Iyinoluwa Aboyeji who left the company in 2019 and Olugbenga Abgoola, Flutterwave works as a payments gateway allowing businesses to use its APIs to and customise their payments network.
Flutterwave Partners WorldPay
Flutterwave has also partnered with global payments processor, Worldpay, making it the payment provider for Worldpay in Africa.
“With this partnership, any Worldpay merchant in Europe or the U.S. can accept any African payment. If someone goes to pay Netflix with an African card, it just works.”
Olugbenga Abgbola says to Techcrunch
This is just the latest major partnership secured by the startup. Last year, Flutterwave partnered Alibaba’s Alipay to connect African businesses with China. It also partnered with Visa which led to the launch of a consumer payment product for Africa called GetBarter.
The startup also recently partnered with cryptocurrency exchange platform, Binance to allow Nigerians buy Bitcoin (BTC) using the Naira.
