Payment performance platform NjiaPay today announced the successful close of its seed funding round, led by one of Europe’s leading B2B SaaS investors, Newion. The investment is a significant Northern European vote of confidence in African fintech infrastructure. Coming just 12 months after NjiaPay closed a pre-seed round, it signals a new phase of growth for payment orchestration across the continent.

Founded by Jonatan Allback, former VP at Adyen, and Roderick Simons, former CTO of Yolt, NjiaPay combines deep experience in regulated European payments and Open Banking with on-the-ground insight into Africa’s fragmented payment landscape.

“Closing this seed round with Newion is a pivotal moment for NjiaPay,” Jonatan Allback, CEO of NjiaPay, says. “In just one year, we have demonstrated that payment orchestration is not optional in Africa, it is mission-critical. We are grateful for Newion’s conviction and partnership. Their experience scaling B2B software businesses will be instrumental as we accelerate growth and ensure every merchant on our platform has the most efficient path.”

Mathijs de Wit, Managing Partner at Newion Partners added: "At Newion, we back founders with deep category expertise who solve foundational business problems with exceptional software. Despite rapid fintech innovation, payments across Africa remain fragmented and complex for merchants. NjiaPay addresses this with a robust, enterprise-grade orchestration layer that unifies providers, increases reliability, and optimises transaction performance. NjiaPay’s growth clearly validates the value it delivers to merchants.”

While mature markets benefit from consolidated acquiring and unified commerce platforms, African merchants typically rely on multiple Payment Service Providers to maintain redundancy, access local payment methods and ensure regional coverage. This structural necessity introduces operational complexity, performance volatility and revenue leakage.

To maximise successful payment outcomes, the company’s single, provider-agnostic API sits above multiple PSPs, acting as a payments control tower. Rather than replacing PSPs, NjiaPay operates as a neutral orchestration layer, intelligently routing transactions and delivering a single pane of glass for performance visibility.

The concept was developed in response to live operating conditions. In 2024, the founding team built an internal orchestration system for Talk360, one of Africa’s largest international calling platforms. After implementation, Talk360 consolidated six PSP integrations into one and achieved a 25% increase in checkout conversion in key markets. The measurable uplift validated broader market demand and led to the productisation of NjiaPay.

Allback brings 15 years of merchant-focused payments experience, having scaled global operations for Amazon, Netflix and Uber. Simons built the technical foundations at Yolt, joining as its first engineer and growing the team to 70 over six years. Together, they saw that Africa’s fragmented payment landscape needed a coordination layer built on deep payments expertise and API-driven architecture.

By applying globally proven infrastructure design to a complex local market, NjiaPay is positioning itself as the standard orchestration layer for Africa’s distributed payments ecosystem.