Nigerian Crypto Startup, Payourse, Raises $600k Pre-seed

Nigerian crypto startup, Payourse, has announced it raised $600k in a pre-seed funding round to help it scale its products, employ more people, and expand into other markets.

Participants in the round include Micheal Ugwu, Flori Ventures, Olumide Soyombo’s Voltron Capital, Allegory Capital, CELO co-founders Marek Olszewski and Rene Reinsberg, Kola Aina of Ventures Platform, Angel Touch Holdings, and Oluwatobi Anisere.

Payourse was founded in September 2019 by Bashir Aminu (CEO) and John Anisere (CTO) with the aim of creating user-friendly products and solutions to help Africans accept cryptocurrency.

Following the Central Bank of Nigeria’s recent prohibition on crypto trading bank accounts, Payourse has partnered with various companies that give liquidity (Fiat currencies like the Naira) anytime someone executes a transaction on its P2P marketplace. Payourse’ s partners receive the signal and complete the transactions within minutes afer the crypto transfer has been made.

Bashir Aminu co-founder and CEO of Payourse noted that he conceived the concept of Payourse while working at Busha. He decided to develop a number of web3 tools and APIs to support the Coinprofile product powerful and flexible enough for other businesses to incorporate, build, and prosper on.

Holly Liu, Visiting Partner at Flori Ventures, said: “I worked closely with Bashir as a visiting Partner at Flori Ventures. I’ve spent 4 batches at YC and rarely do I see a company with this kind of knockout performance and a founder who is willing to put in the hard work to continue to nurture it.

“Bashir is capable of meeting the demands of a crazy growth startup and also ramp up fundraising,” Holly added.

Payourse intends to ensure that individuals can build no-code crypto products, similar to how they can build web apps on the Bubble platform without writing a single line of code.