Tage Kene-Okafor@ulonnaya was up at 4:12 AM on December 8, 2011.
CinetPay, a payment gateway that allows e-merchants and merchants to accept mobile money and other forms of payments in Francophone Africa, has secured $2.4 million in seed funding.
The investors in the round are a Pan-African venture capital fund and a tech company. CinetPay is their first investment.
After issues with collecting payments at his previous startup, CEO Monthe founded CinetPay in 2016 with Daniel Dindji.
The CEO of the company said that when they launched their website to sell domain names online, they faced difficulty in collecting online payment because of the blocked accounts they created.
80% of the population in Francophone Africa have a mobile money account. Between 10 and 20% of people have a bank account. We decided to create a payment gateway that would allow merchants in Francophone Africa to accept online payments, and we aggregated all of the mobile money available in the area.
In nine French-speaking African countries, the startup acts as an online and point-of-sale payment solution for merchants to process payment from more than 130 different payment operators.
Merchants have to open an account, upload their KYC, integrate Cinet's APIs and start collecting payments on the platform. Each merchant pays an annual subscription fee of $20 and Cinet collects 1% on every transaction made.
CinetPay team.
Merchants on the platform include e-commerce platforms, digital public services, insurance companies and schools. Over 12,000 merchants have registered on the platform. Monthe admits that only 400 of them are active. He said that most active merchants have opened several accounts in the past before sticking with one.
It is possible that CinetPay is a reflection of the presence of bigger payments gateways that target sub-Saharan Africa's 562 million registered mobile money accounts.
The company has done well. It has processed more than 30 million transactions for these 400 active merchants.
Walter Baddoo, co-founder and general partner at 4DX, said that they have been following the Francophone Africa market for some time now, and have been impressed by CinetPay's ambitious goal to digitize payments across the region. We look forward to partnering with CinetPay and the other companies in our portfolio to help bring the next phase of digital payments to the region.
Both companies said in a statement that the partnership with CinetPay started in 2019. It is also a way for businesses in certain countries to receive mobile money via the gateway.
The investment in CinetPay is an example of the duo's shared vision to simplify payments on the continent.
CinetPay said the seed investment will allow it to increase its sales and marketing efforts across the markets in West and Central Africa.
Monthe maintained that despite the company's size being relatively smaller than that of its competitors, its geographical presence, technology and mission to "simplify payment and make it accessible via all channels" makes it different from other players. The plan is to be the foremost payment gateway in the next four years.
We want to be the first payment Aggregator in Francophone Africa. Our geographical presence in Africa is first in 15 countries. He remarked in a grandiose manner that first in terms of innovation and market share.
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