South African crypto payments provider MoneyBadger has secured $400,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by P1 Ventures, a venture capital firm with strong African fintech expertise.
The round included investments from three Bitcoin and crypto-focused angel investors, with part of the funding received in Bitcoin.
The funding will help MoneyBadger expand its Bitcoin payment infrastructure, enabling more merchants and consumers in South Africa and abroad to transact using cryptocurrency.
MoneyBadger growing adoption in South Africa
MoneyBadger was founded in 2022 when Pick n Pay sought a way to integrate Bitcoin payments into its point-of-sale systems.
The company developed a fast, low-cost payment solution that outperformed traditional credit card tap-to-pay systems using the Bitcoin Lightning Network.
“Thanks to advances in Bitcoin payments technology, specifically the Bitcoin Lightning network, we were able to deliver a working prototype that performed phenomenally well—super-reliable, faster, and cheaper than tap-to-pay with a credit card,” said Carel van Wyk, MoneyBadger CEO.
By February 2023, Pick n Pay had rolled out Bitcoin payments across all its stores, including PnP Express and Pick n Pay Clothing, which allow customers to buy groceries, airtime, electricity, flight tickets, and even municipal bills using Bitcoin.
“Pick n Pay sees over R1 million in cryptocurrency passing through our tills every month, and this continues to grow,” said Deven Moodley, Pick n Pay’s executive head of value-added services. “Crypto payments fit into our Ways2Pay strategy of giving more customers mechanisms to pay in our stores.”
Furthermore, MoneyBadger’s platform, CryptoQR, allows seamless Bitcoin transactions via QR codes and integrates with major crypto wallets like Binance, Luno, VALR, and AltCoinTrader.
The startup has also partnered with Ecentric, a payments provider servicing two-thirds of South Africa’s listed retailers, to bring Bitcoin into everyday retail.
The company plans to use the new funding to:
Expand partnerships with Tier 1 retailers, e-commerce gateways, and QR-based payment networks.
Increase adoption among merchants and consumers.
Explore international markets beyond South Africa.
“This funding round, partly funded in Bitcoin, helps us accelerate these partnerships and expand our well-established service to more consumers, more merchants, more use-cases, and more countries,” said Van Wyk. “We envision a future where you can buy anything and everything with Bitcoin.”
A bet on Africa’s crypto future
While global crypto regulation remains uncertain, MoneyBadger proves that Bitcoin can work at scale in Africa.
“While the West debates crypto regulation, MoneyBadger is making Bitcoin spendable at scale,” said Hisham Halbouny, Managing Partner at P1 Ventures. “We believe the future of crypto utility will be written here in Africa.”
Van Wyk, who discovered Bitcoin in 2010 through a Reddit thread, shared his excitement on LinkedIn today:
“For me, reading about ‘magic internet money’ in a Reddit thread in 2010 led to a decade and a half of effort to ‘make Bitcoin money.’ From building Luno to now building MoneyBadger, I feel like we are finally there! A borderless, radically inclusive, internet-native currency is no longer only a sci-fi theme. It’s here, it’s real, and adoption is growing.”
With Bitcoin’s price surging from $40,000 in 2022 to over $120,000 in July 2025, the demand for crypto payments is expected to keep rising.
MoneyBadger is positioning itself at the forefront of this financial development, bridging the gap between Bitcoin and everyday commerce in Africa and beyond.
