NIGERIA – Thepeer, an African tech infrastructure startup connecting businesses’ wallets, has secured a US$2.1 million seed fund in a round led by the Raba Partnership.
Other investors joining the round include Rallycap, BYLD Ventures, Timon Capital, Musha Ventures, Sunu, and Uncovered Fund, as well as leading African fintechs Chipper Cash and Stitch.
This round of funding comes less than a year after the company’s pre-seed round, which included angel investors Ezra Olubi (co-Founder & CTO at Paystack) and Prosper Otemuyiwa (co-Founder & CTO at Edenlife).
Thepeer is an API infrastructure company focused on solving this problem and building an alternative network of money movement between fintechs, consumers, and businesses.
It was founded by Kosisochukwu Chike Ononye (CEO) and Michael ‘Trojan’ Okoh (CTO) who identified the costly and cumbersome movement of money between mobile wallets as a ripe opportunity for innovation.
It offers three products that fintechs and businesses can embed into their application/websites, Direct Charge allows customers of different businesses to fund their wallets from other businesses; Send allows customers of businesses to send money to each other instantly, and Checkout allows customers to pay for items online from any store that accepts payment via Thepeer.
“We see our product as a platform powered by APIs that helps connect fintechs, consumers, and businesses by offering seamless money movement,” said Thepeer’s CEO, Chike Ononye.
“Today, there are nearly 600 fintechs across the continent, most of which operate siloed wallets. Our goal is to make it possible to connect and make payments from any wallet. We are building an operating system so that businesses can offer more services to their customers.”
Since its launch in August 2021 through the first quarter of 2022, Thepeer has achieved an average MoM transaction growth of 161%.
According to the company, the recently launched product, Send, focused on sending money between businesses, has made its monthly transaction volume to grow to over 65X to double-digit million dollars.
“The opportunity that Thepeer is addressing reminded us of the fragmented card and mobile money payments landscape Flutterwave identified six years ago,” said George Rzepecki, Founder of Raba Partnership.
Raba Partnership has been an early investor in several foundational infrastructure payments API companies, including Flutterwave (card payments), Stitch (account-to-account payments), and BVNK (crypto payments).
“Today, with the proliferation of consumer and B2B fintechs across Africa, Thepeer is building a foundational API-based payments layer where fintechs can enable money movement natively from within their respective wallets and apps. We are incredibly excited to support this ambitious team building a next-generation network,” Rzepecki added.
Currently, Thepeer is powering the infrastructure of key businesses including Eversend and Nguvu Health.
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