SA fintech Peach Payments secures $31 million in Series A
South African-founded fintech Peach Payments has secured $31 million in Series A funding from private equity fund manager Apis Growth Fund II.
The fund is managed by Apis Partners LLP (Apis Partners), a UK-based asset manager, which announced the investment today, warning that completion of the transaction is subject to approval by South Africa’s antitrust authority – the Competition Commission.
If the deal is approved, Apis Growth Fund II will join existing shareholders that include UW Ventures, Launch Africa and AG Ventures.
Founded by Jain and Andreas Demleitner in 2012 in Cape Town, South Africa, Peach Payments provides a payment gateway to local online merchants. It expanded to Kenya in 2018 and to Mauritius in 2021. Peach Payments’ goal since its founding has been to be the online payment infrastructure provider that helps businesses scale. To achieve this goal, the business has focused as much on its merchants’ customers as the merchants themselves.
The company offers a toolset that enables merchants to accept, manage and make payments via mobile and online. Services offered include online payment acceptance, withdrawals (withdrawals) and subscription solutions across a range of payment types, including cards, electronic funds transfer, digital wallets, mobile money and Buy Now Pay Later options.
“We continue to see significant opportunities in African payments as strong secular trends unrelated to annual business cycles – such as the conversion from cash to digital and in-store to online payments – persist across key markets,” Matteo Stefanel, co. -founder and managing partner, Apis Partners, said.
He adds: “We have been impressed by the vision and execution of the management team as Peach Payments leverages these trends to bring more end users into the digital economy, a key part of our efforts to democratize access across the continent. partner with Peach Payments to expand our reach into new markets with innovative merchant solutions.”
Fintech has experienced significant growth in recent years, with revenue increasing by more than 650% since 2020, and 80% in 2022 alone. Peach Payments intends to use the investment from the fund to accelerate its expansion across new African markets. As it says, “to deepen its product offering, and to reinforce its core value proposition for sellers”.
According to Rahul Jain, co-founder and CEO of Peach Payments, the company’s growth has been driven by “fundamental forces and changes in consumer and business adoption of digital commerce”.
“Across market segments – from retail to digital learning, training and even traditional financial services – we’ve acquired new customers in almost every vertical. We’ve built a very strong team of exceptional operators and I’m delighted to partner with team at Apis and take this business to where it deserves to be. The Apis team brings an incredible wealth of experience in fintech across the globe and we look forward to exploring exponential opportunities with them,” Rahul added.
