Bizao, a fintech that facilitates payments for both local and international businesses operating in Africa, announces an €8 million series A funding to accelerate its geographical footprint across the continent and invest in the design of new lines of products and services.

Launched in 2019, Bizao facilitates, in a transparent and secure manner, the processing of end-to-end payment flows to and from the main digital payment systems in Africa (airtime, mobile money wallets, credit card). Within 3 years, Bizao has expanded its operations in 10 African countries (Burkina-Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal, Tunisia, Togo, Gabon) and has built a robust and cutting-edge infrastructure that processes over 350 million payment requests per month.

Bizao’s modular and scalable platform allows clients to collect and issue payments online and in-stores via point-of-sale (POS).

The technology used by Bizao ensures end-to-end transactions traceability and is hence, up to the latest standards of banking and finance regulation to prevent fraud and money laundering. This, ultimately, enables Bizao to deepen its relationship with its partners.

“We have spent the last few years working closely with our partners (telecoms operators, banks and mobile wallet providers) to improve our products and services in line with our customer requirements. Thanks to this close collaboration with industry players, we have multiplied the transaction volumes processed by our platform by almost 20 over the past 12 months. This round of financing will enable us to design new product lines for high-potential vertically integrated organisations, expand in new markets and grow the team across all our offices”

said Aurélien Delort-Duval, Founder and CEO of Bizao.

The founding round was led by:

• AfricInvest Financial Inclusion Vehicle (AfricInvest FIVE), a leading private equity company with operations in Africa
• Adelie, a multi-stage venture capital fund focused on technology companies
• Seedstars Africa Ventures, an Africa focused early-stage venture capital fund

“Bizao provides an adequate response to the deficient infrastructure of interoperable payment schemes in Africa, enabling an affordable access to a broad range of transactional financial services for the benefit of underbanked populations as well as small and medium-sized enterprises. This ambition to connect and converge different payment channels (mobile wallets, debit cards and airtime) towards Bizao’s unique platform is in line with the high-impact strategy of AfricInvest-FIVE vehicle aiming to foster financial inclusion in Africa through equity investment in financial institutions, including banks, insurance companies and high-potential fintech companies, in order to accelerate their growth.”

said Omar Bekkali, Partner at AfricInvest

Featured image credit: Edited from Unsplash