‍Revio, the payment orchestration platform helping merchants optimize their order to cash lifecycle, today announced a seed investment round of $5.2 million. The funding round was led by leading fintech fund QED Investors, joined by Partech and continued participation from Revio’s existing investors, Speedinvest, RaliCap, and Everywhere VC. 

The company plans to use the capital to further grow Revio’s coverage across Africa, deepen its routing logic, and expand its capabilities to add more value to customers. The company will be scouting for top talent across the continent and in key international markets to support its growth.

“Digital payments are growing rapidly across Africa, projected to reach $146 billion in 2023, before taking into account ~$500 billion in mobile money transactions,” explained co-founder and CEO, Ruaan Botha. “However, there are unique market challenges and opportunities in how payments are made and collected on the continent. The most glaring is the immense fragmentation of the payments ecosystem, with more than 280 licensed payment service providers, 42 currencies, and the unique consumer payment cultures that exist.”

“On top of that, a large majority of the consumer base is still coming online, and does not have high discretionary incomes, forcing them to closely control their cash flow,” added co-founder and COO, Nicole Dunn. “The result is that both local and global merchants struggle to reach customers and collect revenue, with high cost of customer acquisition, painful and complex integration processes, and high rates of payment failures.” 

Through its single payment API and orchestration platform, Revio creates new opportunities for merchants, payment providers, and platforms to work together to increase customer acquisition, success rates, and retention. Beyond abstracting the initial complexity of multiple payment integrations and onboarding processes, the company helps global and local merchants optimize their end-to-end payment processes, through features such as intelligent transaction routing, automated failover and retries, and real-time customer engagement workflows.

“We have a strong conviction that payments in Africa hasn’t been fully solved. Revio is building a platform that can unlock increased e-commerce and digital payment activity on the continent, and help both global and local merchants reach new customer segments. We are excited to back the exceptional team that has proven they can execute even in tough market conditions, and localize very strongly to win enterprise customers,” shared Gbenga Ajayi, Partner and Africa Lead at QED Investors. 

Said Botha: “We are grateful for the support of leading global and local investors, especially those as well-regarded as QED and Partech. With this funding, we are excited to double down and unlock new adjacent opportunities for value creation for our growing base of clients.”

Since its last funding round, led by Speedinvest, in June 2022, Revio has expanded its coverage to include more than 25 African markets and 70 payment methods. The company now counts four of Africa’s largest insurers and two largest telcos as clients, and has secured a strategic partnership with a tier 1 African bank to offer distribution to its base of enterprise and mid-size clients. 

“Our team has built an incredible pipeline in large, regulated industries,” shared Dunn. “Our clients’ trust and exceptional partner network, combined with this new capital injection, infer strong validation and credibility, which we believe will accelerate our growth and attract world-class talent. We have put ourselves in the best position to be the trusted partner for payment operations in Africa.”

“For every online or offline transaction in Africa, there are tens of providers offering to process the transaction,” explained Matthieu Marchand, Principal at Partech. “Today’s issue for international and African enterprises is to make sure they get payments right: collecting cash where customers' money is held, offering the right payment methods, identifying the most reliable processing routing, reconciling millions of transactions with many different payment methods in several different currencies with customer information and ERP properly. This is what Revio solves and this is a game-changer for their customers.”