Thepeer, an African tech infrastructure startup connecting businesses’ wallets, has secured a $2.1 million seed round led by The Raba Partnership. Other participating investors in this round include Ralil_cap Ventures, BYLD Ventures, Timon Capital, Musha Ventures, Sunu and Uncovered Fund, and other African fintechs such as Chipper Cash and Stitch.
Founded in August 2021 by Kosisochukwu Chike Ononye (CEO) and Michael Okoh (CTO), Thepeer was launched as a solution to the costly and challenging movement of money between mobile wallets. This round of funding is coming less than a year after it raised a $220,000 pre-seed round from angel investors.
Currently operating only in Nigeria, the latest funding will help Thepeer expand to other African countries, including Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt.
Thepeer is an API-based company that enables its customers, majorly small and medium-sized businesses and fintechs, to allow their own customers to fund their accounts from other businesses, send money across their different wallets, and pay for items from their wallets seamlessly.
The startup’s solution is further bolstered by the rise in the number of fintech companies on the continent due to the backing they are currently receiving from venture capital firms.
“Today, there are nearly 600 fintechs across the continent, most of which operate siloed wallets. Our goal is to make it possible to connect and make payments from any wallet. We are building an operating system so that businesses can offer more services to their customers,” Thepeer’s CEO Ononye said in a statement.
Thepeer has a suite of business and customer-facing products that facilitate seamless money transfers between businesses and their customers. Direct Charge allows customers of different businesses to fund their wallets from other businesses; Checkout allows customers to pay for items online from any store that accepts payment via Thepeer.
Its latest product, Send, launched 3 months ago, allows businesses to send and receive money from one another via a dashboard. Since Send’s launch, Thepeer said that its monthly transaction volume has grown over 65 times to reach double-digit million dollars. The company also said that since its launch in August 2021, through Q1-22, it has achieved average MoM transaction growth of 161%.
“The opportunity that Thepeer is addressing reminded us of the fragmented card and mobile money payments landscape Flutterwave identified 6 years ago,” Raba Partnership’s founder George Rzepecki said in a statement.
“Today, with the proliferation of consumer and B2B fintechs across Africa, Thepeer is building a foundational API-based payments layer where fintechs can enable money movement natively from within their respective wallets and apps.”
