The $55M Bet On Africa's Payment Chaos
Hey Payments Fanatic!
Africa's payments fragmentation problem just attracted some serious capital 🤯
Moment, the Cape Town-headquartered payments infrastructure company, has raised $22M in a Series A led by AlphaCode Venture Partners, with General Catalyst and French media giant Canal+ joining the round.
That brings total funding to $55M in just 3 years!
Here's why this one caught my attention: Africa doesn't have a single dominant payment method. South Africa is still heavily cash-at-counter. Nigeria runs on instant bank transfers. East Africa lives on mobile money.
Building a unified layer across all of that is not just hard, but it's the kind of infrastructure play that, if it works, becomes impossible to rip out.
Moment's numbers suggest it's working. The platform processes 600,000 transactions daily, reaches 10 million people a month, and operates across more than two million physical locations. That's not a pilot. That's scale.
Now, let's dive into today's biggest Payments stories 👇
See you tomorrow!
Cheers,
NEWS
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🇿🇦 Canal+ and General Catalyst back African payments startup Moment in a $22M Series A led by AlphaCode Venture Partners. The Cape Town company aggregates cards, mobile money and bank transfers behind a single API, handling 600,000 daily transactions.
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🇺🇸 Western Union launches Stablecard in partnership with Rain, combining a physical and virtual Visa card with a stablecoin wallet for everyday spending. Read more.
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