South African fintech, Peach Payments secures investment round led by UW Ventures.
South African fintech company, Peach Payments has secured an undisclosed investment round led by Umkhathi Wethu Ventures (UW Ventures), in partnership with Allan Gray to enable it to expand across Africa.
Other industry executives from Europe, South Africa, and existing investors took part in the round.
The South African fintech, Peach Payments operates a B2B online payments platform for SME’s and large businesses in South Africa.
The Co-founder of Peach Payments, Rahul Jain in an interview with Ventureburn revealed that the round was above R10-million.
The COVID-19 pandemic has helped the company to close sales from merchants who have pondered on whether to go with Peach Payments or not.
For that reason, the company was able to close an agreement in March with one popular website building platform, Wix.
The agreement will allow the business to offer support for platforms such as Xero and Wix to simply make African startups and SMEs move their business online.
Peach Payments will help users of the Wix platform to build online businesses and to have access to market-leading card processing as well as EFT solutions.
Furthermore, the startup is a payment partner for Shopify, WooCommerce Magento, and others.
With the expansion in mind, Jain said Peach Payments launched in Kenya in 2016, when the company started signing up merchants after coming up against regulatory challenges there. However, the story changed when the Kenyan government later changed some payment regulations.
Even though the COVID-19 pandemic has restricted travel between African states, Jain revealed that it has been working on the expansion to other African countries.
“The acceleration of the adoption of e-commerce won’t go back after locKdown”, Jain added.
According to Jain, the demand for Peach Payments is growing. The company currently services between 1500 and 2000 merchants which include three of South Africa’s four big supermarket groups. It is now signing up 200 to 300 new merchants every week.
To meet the high demand, the company now has 40 employees, while staff members are working on weekends and in the evenings.
Peach Payments was founded in 2012 by German Andreas Demleitner and Indian born Rahul Jain.