It has become a thing of pride to be found in the African Tech space as African founders and African startups are increasingly excelling and making the continent proud. One of such proud moments occurred when Jumia attained the rare African e-commerce Unicorn status after being listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and valued at a whopping $1Billion.
Notable among Africa’s technology and online community, a fast rising giant in the African online payments and e-commerce space is Flutterwave.
Founded in 2006 with Headquarters in San Francisco and offices in four African Cities (Lagos, Accra, Johannesburg and Nairobi), Flutterwave has a mission to “Inspire a new wave of prosperity across Africa by building payments infrastructure to connect Africa to the global economy”. Proving true to this mission, they operate in 30+ African countries and have plans to expand their services further into the continent.

Flutterwave has excelled in the area of online payment processing, developing infrastructure to help Africans and Businesses in Africa make and receive international payments in their local currency by integrating payment-service providers and banks into its platform. This is made possible through partnership with over 50+ pan African banks and some of the biggest players in Fintech which includes; Flywire, Visa etc. Little wonder over a thousand (1,000+) businesses rely on Flutterwave’s API for payment processing all over Africa. Most notable among their clientele are; Jumia, Bookings.com and international e-hailing giant Uber.

They’ve taken payment service delivery in Africa to a whole new level, created a fully integrated payment ecosystem and increased the ease of transactions by aiding businesses to receive payments in customer’s preferred payment method and currency. They’ve also been able to help businesses amplify their global online activities through their integration with global and major e-commerce tools like Quickbooks, Shopify and WooCommerce.
To further serve diverse class of individual clients and merchants alike, Flutterwave introduced two (2) flagship products:

RAVE which is a payment integration platform; opens up businesses to accept a range of payment methods from over 154+ countries and in 150+ supported currencies around the world. Rave allows payments to be received directly from local banks, mobile wallets or credit and debit cards with guaranteed zero failed transactions. Rave is cost effective with no set up or monthly fees businesses only pay token fees on successful transactions. Another advantage of this product is that it drives sales by displaying and accepting payments in customer’s local or preferred currency which eliminates the bottleneck of currency conversion.

BARTER is another product that Flutterwave introduced to help individualss manage, monitor and schedule payments. With Barter, customers can pay subscriptions, manage payments, send/receive money and apply for quick loans. Barter is designed to be the one stop finance and cash flow manager which partners with the user to monitor earnings, savings and spending. With over thirty thousand (30,000+) active users Barter is increasing getting popular in the Fintech space while attracting users from all around Africa.

Flutterwave achieved another excellent feat that saw them move higher up the Fintech food chain when they announced their partnership with Alipay: Alibaba’s payment platform and digital wallet. This partnership opened Flutterwave up to over 1billion Alibaba active users that will no more have payment glitch when willing and ready to transact business in and with Africa while opening African businesses to China and vice versa. The Flutterwave-Alipay partnership is key to Flutterwave capturing payments in the huge and growing Asian-African trade which is currently worth a mouth gaping $200Billion annually. Already, Flutterwave has processed over 100Million transactions worth $2.6Billion, this partnership is poised to raise their transaction portfolio and volume even higher in the coming months.

The success of Flutterwave can be attributed to a number of factors although, I think the calibre of Co-founders/Talents and Funding stands unique.

Co-founders & Talents
Flutterwave’s pool of talents which consists of creative innovators, engineers, ex-bankers and entrepreneurs is led by Olugbenga “GB” Agboola: a reticent CTO who has a Software Engineering background, an MBA and an illustrious career spanning fourteen (14) years across Banking and Fintech sectors in African/global brands like GTbank, Stanbic IBTC, Access Bank and PayPal.
GB as fondly called, is the current CEO at Flutterwave and if results are anything to go by, I’d say he’s doing a fantastic job!
The more popular co-founder is a superstar in the African tech space, a serial tech entrepreneur and wiz kid (Nigeria 20 under 20) who also co-found Andela; Iyin “E” Aboyeji.
Iyin is the founding CEO who led Flutterwave through and up to her latest round of funding but left the reigns as CEO in 2018 to focus on family goals while mentoring and growing the next generation of tech entrepreneurs and startups in Africa. He has a long list of global honours which includes; the Forbes 30 under 30 honouree, WEF Young Global Leader, amongst others.



Funding.
Since inception, Flutterwave has secured funding from global investment giant Green Visor Capital and Greycroft Partners who have remained their largest investors till date. This financing has seen the Chairman and general partner of Green Visor Capital who was also the former Chairman and CEO of Visa; Joe Saunders join Flutterwave’s Board of Directors.

Flutterwave has raised a total of $20.4M (20.4 Million USD) in 8 Funding rounds. Latest funding of $10M (10 Million USD) was raised in October 2018 from a Series A Round. In this round Raba Capital and MasterCard became the most recent investors to make a total of twenty five (25) investors which includes; Glynn Capital, Fintech Collective, 4DX Ventures, Social Capital, amongst others.

It is quite commendable the amount of growth that occurred through hard work and innovation which has transformed Flutterwave from a startup to a budding global Fintech and online payments giant, forging partnerships and creating innovative products to open African e-commerce to the global digital economy. This growth trajectory has seen Flutterwave capture a substantial percentage of online payment transactions in the continent of Africa.

Undoubtedly, the team at Flutterwave are recording tremendous successes and have attained unimaginable heights in just three (3) years of operations and it does not seem like they are resting on their oars. Projections of strategic partnerships and a few more Fintech solutions, Flutterwave could very well become the king of online payments in Africa and in a few more years, just maybe the Next African Unicorn.