QED and Partech are providing financial support for the South African payment orchestration platform Revio, with a seed investment of $5.2 million.
The landscape of payments in Africa is still rather fragmented, with a number of different payment operators offering a variety of payment solutions to customers as well as enterprises. Payment failures are unavoidable due to this fragmentation for various reasons, including invalid cards, inactive accounts, and high dispute rates.
Revio, a startup based in South Africa, is one of the very few companies now working on payment orchestration to solve this fragmentation. After realising how much time and human work businesses spend collecting payments across numerous providers and engaging customers on outstanding and failed payments, Ruaan Botha, the co-founder and CEO of the fintech company, revealed that he was inspired to launch the company after hearing this information.
“Digital payments are growing rapidly across Africa, projected to reach $146 billion in 2023, before taking into account almost $500 billion in mobile money transactions,” Botha revealed.
“However, there are unique market challenges and opportunities in how payments are made and collected on the continent. The most glaring is the immense fragmentation of the payments ecosystem, with more than 280 licensed payment service providers, 42 currencies and the unique consumer payment cultures that exist.”
Read also: Revio Connects Businesses To Payment Methods To Reduces Payment Failures
How the fund will improve Revio’s operation
The young startup, which has been in operation for two years, offers businesses assistance in optimising their order-to-cash lifecycles and resolving challenges that arise from using a variety of payment methods by utilising its application programming interfaces (APIs). The most recent piece of news is that the company has successfully raised $5.2 million in seed capital in order to bolster its efforts in combating these missed payments, which are responsible for digital firms losing billions of dollars in annual recurring income.
Revio has been successful in acquiring finance on two separate occasions in the past year, as seen by the current investment round. It was announced in November that the company had received pre-seed capital totalling $1.1 million from investors, including Speedinvest, Ralicap, and Everywhere VC. In the seed round that was led by QED, these investors issued follow-on checks, and they were joined by the growth-stage pan-African VC Partech.
According to Nicole Dunn, co-founder and chief operating officer of Revio, the participation of QED and Partech, which are typically known for their growth-stage investments, in Revio’s seed round is a testament to the relevance of its product (Partech Africa invests in Series A and B deals, and this is QED’s first seed check in an African startup after Moniepoint’s pre-Series C and Remedial Health’s Series A).
The impact of Revio in Africa
When a company has operations in a number of countries and welcomes a diverse range of payment methods, the utilisation of payment orchestration systems becomes an increasingly critical component of the business.
Revio and other comparable startups, such as MoneyHash, which is based in Egypt, perform the same function for the African continent as Primer, Spreedly, and Zooz do for the United States and Europe through their respective application programming interfaces (APIs).
Revio has developed a lifecycle called order-to-cash, which is also known as an end-to-end payment value chain. This lifecycle may be used by merchants to collect income from their customers. These retailers link to more than 70 payment methods and service providers through its application programming interface (API), which grants them access to transaction routing, automated failover and retries, and real-time customer engagement workflows. These features all contribute to an increase in payment success rates.
In addition, Revio has just recently introduced a revenue recovery use case based on the realisation that the failure of payment in Africa is not always the result of technical difficulties; it may also be the result of inadequate funds or an abandoned authorization. This realisation led to the development of Revio’s new use case.
To this aim, the platform drives real-time action using channels like as email, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications to re-engage customers in the process of checking out and to offer them a more convenient means of payment (cash or flexible payment plans).
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The future goal of Revio
According to Dunn, Revio, which has seen its income expand by a factor of 1,000% over the course of the previous year, also wants to target worldwide retailers servicing the African market during the subsequent phase of its development. She stated that the company had begun contact with a handful of these merchants in order to have a better understanding of what it would take to effectively service them.
This is mostly happening as the company builds capabilities around cross-border reconciliation settlement. The newly invested funds will allow the company to strengthen its technological capabilities in this respect and grow its workforce by recruiting talented people from both inside and outside of the continent.
Gbenga Ajayi, partner and Africa lead at QED Investors, remarked: “We have a strong conviction that payments in Africa hasn’t been fully solved. Revio is building a platform that can unlock increased e-commerce and digital payment activity on the continent and help global and local merchants reach new customer segments.”
“We are excited to back the exceptional team that has proven they can execute even in tough market conditions and localize very strongly to win enterprise customers.”