Payments processing company Flutterwave plans to expand to North Africa after raising $170m in new funding, CEO Olugbenga Agboola tells The Africa Report.
The company will extend its payments network to Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia and will be live there by the middle of the second quarter, Agboola says in Lagos. Flutterwave might then set up a physical presence in those countries, he says. He also wants to expand into francophone Africa as “our network needs to be everywhere” on the continent.
Flutterwave says it has raised $170m from a Series C fundraising which values it at over $1bn, so qualifying the company for “unicorn” status. Agboola’s aim is to make it easier for Africans to build global businesses that can make and accept payments worldwide.
Flutterwave will use the money, raised from investors including Avenir Growth Capital and Tiger Global, to accelerate customer acquisition and develop new products.
The digital payments market in North Africa and the Middle East is set to grow at a compound annual rate of 13.3% until 2026, driven by mobile phone and Internet penetration, according to Mordor Intelligence. It’s “crucial for the region to have an underlying real-time infrastructure in place to enable these payments”, Mordor says.
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