Afridigest Fintech Review: Crypto isn't dead yet
Week 36 2023: Sep 3-9
Afridigest is your intelligent guide to Africa’s tech ecosystem. The Fintech Review is a weekly recap of what matters in African fintech.
On to the week’s fintech highlights:
• Seven African fintech fundraises were announced this week.
• News of the week: Nigerian payments unicorn Flutterwave announced its expansion to India. And real-world use cases of crypto pick up steam.
• Companies appearing in today’s Fintech Review: Anchor, Nestcoin, Onboard, Djamo, CryptoConvert, Flutterwave, Paga, Kotani Pay, & others.
• Executives appearing: Moniepoint’s Tosin Eniolorunda, Flutterwave’s Olugbenga Agboola, Anchor’s Segun Adeyemi, Smile ID’s Mark Straub, PayDay’s Favour Ori, Mastercard’s Mark Elliott and Ebehijie Momoh, Swahilies’ John Haule, Fuhlstack’s Lemuel Okoli, Mono’s Abdul Hassan, Bank of Industry’s Uzoma Nwagba, Carbon’s Ngozi Dozie and Chijioke Dozie, MFS Africa’s Funmi Dele-Giwa, Visa’s Cuy Sheffield, the University of the Western Cape’s Vivienne Lawack & others.
With that said, let’s get into it!
Week 36 2023: Sep 3-9
💸 Equity Fundraising DetailsAnchor, a Nigerian banking-as-a-service and embedded finance platform, raised a $2.4M seed round.
Kotani Pay, a Kenyan on-/off-ramp stablecoin/fiat API infrastructure provider, raised a $2M seed round.
Nestcoin, a Nigerian web3 development platform now focused on its self-custody wallet Onboard, raised $1.9M.
The following fintech startups are participating in Techstars Toronto:
FlexPay, a Kenyan save-now-pay-later platform, raised an undisclosed amount.
ADJACENT
ThetaRay, an Israel-born provider of AI-powered transaction monitoring technology worldwide, raised a $57M round.
ThetaRay previously announced partnerships with MFS Africa, Zone, ZeePay, VigiPay, ClickSendNow, and various other African fintechs to monitor and screen their payments for money laundering and financial crime.
🤝🏽 M&AFuhlstack, a Nigerian developer of components and APIs for crypto startups and fintechs, was acquired for an undisclosed amount by Kotani Pay.
Fuhlstack Founder Lemuel Okoli is now named as a Kotani Pay co-founder and will help steer its new product efforts including its reconciliation-as-a-service and ledger-as-a-service offerings.
📰 News of the WeekIf you haven’t been paying attention, we’re in the middle of a crypto winter.
VCs invested roughly $30 billion into crypto startups globally in 2021 and 2022, but the figure is poised to reach just about $10 billion this year — a ~70% decline.
Here’s a more detailed look at the last 32 months in case you’re interested:
But despite what it might seem like given the charts above, crypto isn’t dead.
To my (admittedly uninitiated) eyes, it seems like the focus has moved sharply away from speculation to utility.
Just this week, for example, Visa made an announcement that I’m told is a big deal for crypto advocates.
I won’t pretend to know the ins and outs here, but my high-level takeaway is that this looks like further legitimacy driven by real-world utility.
And across Africa, this week also brought a number of headlines focused on real-world crypto utility.
In South Africa, customers of the VALR and Luno crypto exchanges can now use their crypto holdings to pay for their groceries at Pick n Pay stores by scanning a QR code at the register.
In Nigeria, Onboard, the crypto wallet from Nestcoin (which announced a fundraise this week), noted that it will soon launch a virtual card product that allows users to make online and in-store payments using crypto.
And in Kenya, Kotani Pay announced a fundraise to power stablecoin-based remittance offerings that promise cost savings.
Things seem to be developing somewhat quickly, but it’s still early days and a number of questions still remain.
The focus on utility is promising, however, and one thing is clear: don’t sound the death knell for crypto quite yet.