For anyone who’s ever bought something online in Lagos, Nairobi or Johannesburg, chances are they didn’t reach for a credit card. They probably used a bank transfer, a mobile wallet, or some hybrid workaround that Western counterparts wouldn’t find familiar. New research by global payments player, dLocal, shows Africa is carving its own path, rather than play catch up, in the global payments race.

Across Africa’s most strategically important markets (from Nigeria to Kenya to South Africa), consumer behaviour, regulation, and infrastructure are shifting fast. And as dLocal’s latest Emerging Markets Payments Handbook shows, this change is structural.

Take Nigeria. With a population north of 230 million and a median age of 18, digital habits are scaling with speed. Mobile phones account for more than 84% of internet traffic, and while fewer than 2% of Nigerians own a credit card, local rails are making up the gap. Bank transfers, powered by NIBSS’s real-time infrastructure, now drive 20% of e-commerce payments, doubling year-on-year in 2024, dLocal finds.

In fact, 1 in 5 online transactions in Nigeria now happens through instant bank transfers. And e-wallets are taking off too; mobile wallets like OPay and Paga—once seen as fringe—now handle about 15% of online payments.

Mobile money remains steady at 15%, led by MoMo and Airtel Money, especially in areas where formal banking access remains limited. And while cash is still part of the picture, especially for rides and food deliveries, its grip is weakening—cash-on-delivery dropped by 17% last year.

“Africa is not an emerging market, it is a thriving force reshaping global commerce,” as dLocal’s regional VP Pardon Mujakachi puts it.

“With the world’s largest and youngest workforce by 2035 and digital payments outpacing cash, the continent is not following trends, it is setting them.”

In Kenya, the story is mobile-first. Credit card penetration sits at just 6.5%, yet mobile money dominates e-commerce, accounting for nearly 50% of transactions. M-PESA leads, but Airtel is making gains. In digital-first sectors like gaming and streaming, mobile money’s share soars above 80%.

The undercurrent? A generational shift. Over half of Kenya’s population is under 25. Seven in ten people who go online do so through mobile. Payments have grown out of daily necessity, not fintech hype—matatus, market stalls, school fees, and rent, all flowing through simple transfers and USSD menus.

While M-PESA still runs the show (nearly half of all online payments go through it), its dominance is starting to soften. People are turning to newer tools like PesaLink (Kenya’s version of instant bank transfers), which is projected to grow 60% by 2026 thanks to PesaLink’s real-time rails.

Meanwhile, the government is pushing for a system where payments across platforms can talk to each other. That could make things easier for users, and more competitive for providers.

In South Africa, a more traditional banking infrastructure coexists with rising alternatives. Cards still account for 64% of e-commerce, dLocal notes, but bank transfers now claim 22% driven largely by CapitecPay, which processes nearly 40% of local transfer volume. And though cash still matters in some rural areas, its e-commerce share is down to just 5%.

PayShap, the country’s instant payment network, has helped move over ZAR 19.5 B (~USD 1.03 B) through 30 million transactions in just two years, according to dLocal’s findings. Open banking discussions are gaining traction, and a national QR standard is underway. If infrastructure gaps, especially outside cities, can be addressed, the upside is significant.

Across these markets, payments are becoming hyperlocal. Not just in currency or interface, but in rhythm. Credit cards are losing ground, cash is in retreat, and a patchwork of e-wallets, bank transfers, mobile money, and local rails is rising in its place.

But fragmentation is a feature, not a bug. As Bashir Yusuf, dLocal’s Nigeria Country Manager, puts it: “This is more than a market shift, it’s a generational change.”

For global businesses hoping to ride the next wave of growth projected to come overwhelmingly from the Global South, ‘localise or be left behind’ increasingly looks the mantra.

Jumia made headlines as the “Amazon of Africa” for much of the last decade, becoming Africa’s first tech unicorn and going public at USD 14.00 a share in 2019 before soaring past USD 50.00. But in 2025, it’s a complicated tale, exiting markets, shedding services, early backers pulling out, and its stock under USD 5.00.

Today, a surprising player is in the wings, plotting a takeover of Africa’s biggest e-commerce company, reports suggest. The suitor is Axian Telecom, the Mauritius-based telecom and fintech group, which recently raised USD 600 M in bonds and quietly amassed an 8% stake in Jumia.

With telecom, mobile money, and brands like Yas and Mixx under its umbrella, which collectively fetched USD 1.1 B in revenue and USD 55 M in profit last year, Axian aims to integrate connectivity, payments, and commerce in one system. Its bond raise, reportedly oversubscribed threefold, was marketed as digital infrastructure capital.

The takeover bid is unfolding against the backdrop of Jumia’s own pivot. CEO Francis Dufay has spent the past two years cutting back—exiting non-core markets like South Africa and Tunisia, cutting services and staff, and narrowing operations to nine key countries.

He’s moved the company from reckless expansion to consolidating fundamentals: rural distribution, pick-up stations, logistics, and stronger margins. “We must deliver the numbers. Execution will rebuild our credibility,” Dufay told the FT last month. And he’s putting a timeline on it: profitability by early 2027.

The stakes are high. Chinese platforms like Temu and Shein are muscling in, using ultra-cheap prices and slick logistics to steal share. Jumia has responded by onboarding low-cost Chinese merchants, creating a Shenzhen team of 70, and folding their offerings into the marketplace.

“We believe we can fight them,” Dufay declared, arguing Jumia’s localised approach and product breadth give it an edge.

And yet the macro still bites. Jumia has weathered multiple currency devaluations across key African markets such as Nigeria and Egypt that crushed margins. Its 2024 revenue fell 10% to USD 167.5 M, with negative EBITDA exceeding USD 54 M; Q1 2025 brought further GMV decline, though Dufay noted orders were up 21% in constant currency.

However, despite GMV growth in constant currency, quarterly active users have stayed stagnant as it struggles to find new customers, and loss-making continued—USD 20 M in Q3 2024 and over USD 18 M in Q1 this year. Although, to their credit, Dufay’s cutbacks have slashed annual losses by over USD 150 M, core profitability remains elusive.

That’s where Axian enters the frame. Telecoms have infrastructure, connectivity, customer reach—and increasingly, money. Combine that with Jumia’s logistics and distribution strength, and that adds up to a digital ecosystem capable of bundling mobile data, mobile money, and e-commerce into one consumer offering. That synergy is reminiscent of what telecoms did in Asia.

Axian CEO Hassan Jaber has framed the bond raise as a strategic “digital infrastructure” play; the acquisition talks have already lifted Jumia shares in New York. And while Dufay has bet on rural Africa’s vast potential—“Africa is the last place on earth with massive untapped demand,” as he put it recently —that demand must translate into reliable repurchase behaviour and stable margins.

Yet the cleanup is underway. Jumia’s soft-exit from unsustainable ventures, its pivot toward Chinese-supplied assortment, and a renewed focus on efficient operations have laid the groundwork. Axian stepping in now indicates infrastructure capital may just write the next chapter.

In much of Africa, trade isn’t held back by a lack of goods or buyers but stalled by cash flow. Exporters ship products, then wait 30, 60, sometimes 90 days to get paid. Banks, when they show up at all, take weeks to process financing and charge fees that make it unworkable for small firms.

Ghanaian startup Liquify is betting that this friction can be abstracted, standardised, and sold as a scalable asset class.

The company just raised USD 1.5 M in seed equity and additional debt financing to expand its digital invoice-financing platform, which helps small exporters in Ghana and Kenya get same-day cash for unpaid invoices.

Since launching its beta in late 2024, Liquify has financed over USD 4 M in transactions, mostly agricultural and light manufacturing exports headed to Europe and North America, as it pursues a quest to close Africa’s USD 120 B annual trade finance gap.

The pitch is classic fintech: speed, automation, and bypassing banks. Liquify’s platform wraps onboarding, KYC, AML, credit scoring, and settlement into a streamlined process that clears invoices in hours, not weeks.

“The average bank process takes over 10 days and costs more than USD 10 K to serve a single SME,” said co-founder and CEO Nadya Yaremenko, a former Citi exec who managed a USD 3 B trade finance portfolio. “We bring that down to a fraction of the time and cost.”

But what Liquify is really doing is making trade receivables investable. The startup buys export invoices at a discount, offering liquidity to SMEs while giving global investors access to short-term, self-liquidating assets, unlinked from broader financial market swings. Investors get yield; exporters get working capital. Everyone avoids the banks.

Of course, there’s a reason this gap hasn’t been filled. The team has had to build trust with SMEs used to informal lending and persuade foreign investors that fragmented invoice claims from African exporters can function like an asset class.

Co-founder Alberta Asafo-Asamoah, who came from the impact investing world, saw up close how “patient capital” wasn’t fast or flexible enough to scale SME exports. Liquify is taking a more transactional route, one that looks less like aid and more like arbitrage.

With the new funding, Liquify plans to expand its risk and compliance engine, grow into Francophone Africa, and test structured investment products.

Whether African trade finance becomes fintech’s next frontier or just another category of repackaged risk may depend on how well the startup balances local complexity with global appetite. For now, Liquify is betting that Africa’s slowest money problem is also its most bankable.

Across markets in Dakar, the Senegalese capital, vendors used to lose nearly a tenth of their daily earnings just by accepting mobile payments. Every transfer from a customer came with a fee (sometimes 5%, even 10%) sliced away by the telecom companies that dominated Senegal’s mobile money market for nearly a decade. Then, in 2018, something changed.

A new player, Wave, arrived with a simple pitch: What if sending money cost almost nothing? And Senegal’s mass market quickly embraced this new order.

That promise—radically cheaper digital payments—has turned Wave into one of Africa’s most valuable startups. Now, with a fresh USD 137 M debt round led by Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) and backed by global development financiers, the company is doubling down on its mission: to make Africa the first cashless continent.

Wave’s rise reads like a playbook for how to disrupt a monopoly. Before its launch, mobile money in West Africa was controlled by telecom operators like Orange, which charged fees as high as 10% per transaction. For millions of small merchants and low-income users, those fees made digital payments more expensive than cash.

Then came Wave—no fees on deposits or withdrawals, just a flat 1% on transfers, with bill payments subsidised by businesses rather than customers. The model was so aggressively consumer-friendly that skeptics questioned its sustainability. Yet six years later, Wave is thriving.

Today, the company operates in eight West African countries, serving 20 million monthly active users through a network of 150,000 mobile money agents. In 2021, it became Francophone Africa’s first unicorn after a record-breaking USD 200 M Series A. Now, with this new funding, it’s eyeing further expansion into Central and East Africa.

The USD 137 M debt round—led by RMB and supported by British International Investment (BII), Norfund, and Finnfund—comes at a pivotal moment. Africa’s startup ecosystem has seen venture funding dip, but debt financing is emerging as an alternative, especially for companies like Wave that have provable scale and revenue.

For development financiers, the appeal is clear as Wave is well-positioned as a financial inclusion machine. “Wave’s platform is a clear example of technology enabling inclusive finance at scale,” said a representative from British International Investment. “This is aligned with our mandate to support digital infrastructure that empowers communities.”

Wave CEO and co-founder Drew Durbin said in a statement that the new “funding means we can help even more people by delivering the best possible product at the lowest possible price.”

“It brings us closer to our mission of making Africa the first cashless continent.”

The numbers back him up. In Senegal alone, Wave now processes more transactions than some traditional banks. And for two years running, it’s been the only African company on Y Combinator’s list of top 50 highest-earning startups.

Wave’s ambitions, however, face real obstacles. Regulators are watching closely as fintechs gain influence, and in some countries, telecom operators still hold political sway. Then there’s the sheer dominance of cash—90% of transactions in Africa are still offline, per World Bank data.

But if anyone can shift that balance, it might be Wave. After all, it’s already done the unthinkable once: making digital money cheaper than cash and accessible to everyone, not just the rich as in the past, while wrestling market share from telecom giants. Now, with fresh capital and a continent still ripe for disruption, it’s betting it can do it again at scale.

The hospital ward wasn’t quiet. It rarely ever was. Phones buzzed, patients coughed, nurses called out vitals, the agitated and impatient nagged, and through it all, young doctor Tobi Olatunji scribbled furiously, trying to keep up with the flood of patients. Thirty on a light day. Double when things got bad.

It was in that noise—noisy, gritty, chaotic—that Intron was born. Today, that same startup, now rebranded from Intron Health to just Intron, is making voice AI models that reportedly outperform OpenAI, Google, AWS, and Azure when it comes to recognising African accents. Intron stacks up well compared to big names, publicly available benchmarks and datasets reflect.

What started as a solution to medical paperwork has morphed into a robust suite of speech tools, called Sahara, powering voice recognition in hospitals, courtrooms, call centres, and government agencies across the continent.

The premise is simple: Big Tech’s speech tools don’t understand Africa. Intron wants to fix that. But building AI for the hardest accents on Earth didn’t start in a lab. It started in Nigeria’s overstretched clinics, where physicians are lucky to have five minutes with a patient and 30 more filling out forms. Olatunji, now Intron’s CEO, saw that broken system up close and decided to do something about it, through code.

***

It’s easy to romanticise startups. But the earliest versions of Intron didn’t even work well. The first doctors who tried the speech-to-text app during the pandemic took 45 minutes to complete their notes—much slower than writing by hand. Some gave up. Others rolled their eyes. But the problem was real: hospital staff overwhelmed, errors stacking up, and patients at risk.

There’s a particularly haunting story: One Dr. Martins, the only physician at his clinic, missed a biomarker on a routine test. The patient, an elderly woman, had a heart attack a few days later. She survived, but barely. The omission wasn’t due to incompetence. He simply didn’t have time.

It was stories like that—and countless others—that pushed Olatunji and his co-founder, Olakunle Asekun, to go deep on speech recognition. Not just adapting foreign tools, but training new models from scratch.

That led to the creation of AccentMix, Intron’s proprietary algorithm designed to handle one of AI’s thorniest challenges: the wild variability of human speech. So far, Sahara’s models have been trained on over 3.5 million audio clips from 18,000+ speakers across 30+ countries. The result? More than 300 African accents recognised with over 92% accuracy, the company claims.

That isn’t only better than Big Tech on paper but a practical breakthrough. For example, in Nigeria’s Ogun State Judiciary, Sahara has cut court transcription times nearly in half. In Uganda, at C-Care hospitals, patient wait times are down and documentation errors are dropping. Branch International, a notable fintech player, now uses Intron’s conversational bots in its call centres to slash queue times.

And unlike most imported models, Intron’s tools don’t stumble on African names, currencies, or medical jargon. It can transcribe “Ayinla” as easily as “John,” “₦1,250” as smoothly as “twenty dollars,” and understands “troponin” just as well as it does “temperature.”

But perhaps the most interesting part of Intron’s story is how it’s moved from a niche healthtech product to something much bigger: voice infrastructure for the continent.

Earlier this year, Intron launched Sahara-Optimus (its general-purpose voice recognition engine), Sahara-TTS (a pan-African text-to-speech system), and Sahara-Voice-Lock (voice authentication for security use cases).

It’s also training Sahara-Titan, a model that can understand, transcribe, and translate across 20 major African languages including Swahili, Hausa, and Zulu. These efforts have gone from research experiments to products shipping now.

It’s a shift that mirrors how platforms like Google started with search, or Amazon with books. Intron began with hospitals, but the engine it’s building is far more universal. “We built for the hardest environment first,” says Olatunji. “Now, our technology scales effortlessly.”

***

Intron isn’t the only startup working on African voice tech, but not many are doing it at this scale or with this data. And while the team still numbers under 20, the traction is real. Intron now serves 40+ organisations across 8 countries, and its models are deployed in healthcare, justice, finance, and youth health initiatives like Audere’s reproductive chatbot in South Africa.

After a USD 1.6 M pre-seed round in 2024, Intron began expanding both its cloud-native and on-prem deployment capabilities—critical in regions with patchy internet—and growing its engineering and research teams. It also joined NVIDIA’s Inception programme and partnered with the Gates Foundation, Google Research, and Digital Square to benchmark global language models across Africa.

Still, challenges persist. Data collection at scale is expensive. Local hardware constraints remain. And global competition is real. While Intron beats the big names on African voice recognition today, OpenAI, Meta, and Google could close the gap quickly. But this is where Intron’s focus becomes its superpower as Big Tech builds for everyone but Intron is Africa-first.

More than two billion people worldwide are underserved by today’s voice AI. For most of them, English isn’t their first language. For many, the tools built in Silicon Valley don’t even work.

That’s not merely an annoyance but a harbinger of real danger. It means errors in clinical notes. Misunderstood legal testimony. Frustrated customers. Lost time. In places where time is a matter of life and death, that gap can’t be shrugged off.

Intron seems on track to build infrastructure that works for the languages, cadences, and constraints of African life. One dictated sentence at a time.

And while it’s still early days, the company’s trajectory shows what happens when you start with the right problem and build deep. Not to catch up with Big Tech, but to leapfrog it on Africa’s terms.

Banking in South Africa just took a sharp digital turn. Lesaka Technologies, the fintech firm formerly known as Net1, is acquiring 100% of digital banking upstart Bank Zero in a ZAR 1.1 B (~USD 61 M) deal.

It’s a rare merger of fintech infrastructure and a full banking license that could redefine how financial services reach underserved customers across the country.

The acquisition—announced via a late-night social post by Bank Zero chairman and ex-FNB CEO Michael Jordaan—is being paid for in a mix of Lesaka shares and up to ZAR 91 M in cash.

The deal gives Bank Zero’s shareholders a 12% stake in Lesaka and signals a strategic pivot. Lesaka, having made its name providing fintech rails, now wants to own a bank, too.

Founded in 2021 by Jordaan and banking veteran Yatin Narsai, Bank Zero has quietly built one of the most radically low-cost banking platforms in South Africa.

Its digital-first, zero-fee model has attracted more than 40,000 funded accounts and ZAR 400 M in deposits, without a physical branch in sight. Its patented card technology, which offers separate numbers for different transaction types, is one of many innovations designed to limit fraud and put control back in the hands of users.

But while Bank Zero focused on design and compliance, it lacked scale. Lesaka, on the other hand, has deep distribution across consumer and merchant segments, including a presence on both the Nasdaq and Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

The pitch is synergy: embedded lending, cross-sell, operational leverage. But the real story is about control—of data, of deposits, and of destiny.

By absorbing Bank Zero’s banking license and tech stack, Lesaka gets to escape its dependency on third-party banks. That opens the door to better margins on lending, a tighter loop on customer behaviour, and more regulatory flexibility. It’s also a bet on long-term infrastructure over short-term fintech flash.

Jordaan and Narsai will stay on, and no layoffs are expected following a move that may well signal what the future of South African finance could look like—digitally native, vertically integrated, and built for people who have never truly had a bank that worked for them.

Better Auth started in an Addis Ababa bedroom with a stubborn problem. Its founder, Bereket Engida, a self-taught developer, was tired of relying on expensive, opaque services like Auth0 and Firebase to handle the messy, critical job of user signups and logins.

So he built an open-source tool that lets developers embed customisable authentication directly into their own code — and kept all the data where it belonged, in their database.

Today, that tiny project has become one of the fastest-rising developer platforms out of Africa. After gaining 150,000 weekly downloads and 15,000 stars on GitHub, Better Auth has just announced a USD 5 M seed round led by Peak XV, with Y Combinator, Chapter One, and P1 Ventures also joining in. It’s the biggest bet yet on an Ethiopian founder tackling global developer infrastructure.

“This funding fuels the next phase of Better Auth,” reads the company’s announcement. “We wanted to prove that you can build global infrastructure out of Africa,” Engida said in an earlier interview with Addis Insight.

The appeal is obvious. In an era when cybersecurity and privacy concerns dominate, Better Auth is a shot across the bow of hosted services that treat user data like a commodity.

Its TypeScript-based framework gives developers a modular way to implement advanced sign-in, role-based access, and session management, making it ideal for early-stage AI startups and SaaS platforms that want to control their own data and save costs.

For Engida, a programmer who started coding after a friend declined to help him build an e‑commerce search tool, this went beyond making a better login as he set out to reshape an industry that treats access and authentication as a bottleneck.

Better Auth’s approach is rooted in a very specific frustration. “I remember needing an organisation feature. It’s a very common use case for most SaaS applications, but it wasn’t available from these providers,” Engida told TechCrunch.

“So I had to build it from scratch. It took me about two weeks, and I remember thinking, ‘This is crazy; there has to be a better way to solve this.’” So he started coding. And when he posted it to GitHub in September 2024, it quickly caught the attention of developers.

In six months, it went from a fledgling GitHub repo to a bustling library with a dedicated following of over 6,000 developers. Its open source core allows teams to self‑host or pick from plug‑and‑play enterprise add‑ons. That approach has started resonating far beyond its Ethiopian roots, making it the first African-led investment for Peak XV.

“Better Auth’s auth product has seen phenomenal adoption among the next generation of AI startups,” said Peak XV partner Arnav Sahu.

Fresh off a stint in Y Combinator, Engida and his co‑founder Kinfe Michael Tariku now have Silicon Valley backing and a global roadmap. The seed funding will help hire a small engineering team, deepen enterprise tooling, and build a seamless experience for developers wary of vendor lock‑in.

At a time when digital trust is under siege and the cost of relying on Big Tech platforms is rising, this Ethiopian upstart is making the case that the best foundation for a connected world can come from anywhere.

For Engida, it’s still early days. “There’s so much more to build,” the founders note. But in a global market tired of compromises, Better Auth may already be the right tool at the right time.

For smallholder farmers in Ghana’s northern plains, access to quality storage, inputs, and markets has long been a bottleneck and the missing link between planting a crop and making a profit.

This week, Complete Farmer, a Ghanaian agritech company, announced EUR 2.2 M (~USD 2.5 M) in fresh financing from the EU’s AgriFI initiative, making a bold bet that fixing this gap can redefine agriculture in one of West Africa’s toughest markets.

The investment, administered by EDFI Management Company, will fund the construction of six fulfilment centres across five northern regions.

Part warehouse, part distribution hub, these centres will give farmers access to quality seeds, storage, quality control, and logistics, providing the basic infrastructure that has long kept rural agriculture fragmented and underpaid.

The goal? To tie 5,000 farmers closer to global buyers and suppliers, making their produce traceable and competitive far beyond the village market.

It’s a model that goes beyond SaaS-style digital platforms. Since 2017, Complete Farmer has built a reputation for combining data and connectivity, from crop protocols tailored to international buyers to mobile platforms that link rural farms with exporters.

Its approach mirrors global giants like Ninjacart and DeHaat, but in Ghana, where financing and infrastructure remain sparse, its biggest differentiator may be its hybrid role as both tech company and rural supply chain builder.

“Better infrastructure and digital platforms mean better access to quality seeds, tools, expert advice, and markets. That ultimately translates into better harvests and improved incomes. and improved incomes,” said Irchad Razaaly, the EU Ambassador to Ghana, hinting at the initiative’s larger promise.

This USD 2.5 M funding forms part of the EU’s EUR 10 M AgriFI Ghana Country Window, an initiative aimed squarely at making agriculture work for the millions of smallholders it still bypasses.

For Complete Farmer, this isn’t a first bet. In 2023, the company secured USD 10 M in private financing to scale across Ghana and neighbouring markets. The new EU-backed investment aims to deepen its rural presence, with a target of reaching 50,000 smallholders by 2028.

The timeline is ambitious, but the payoff could be significant, enabling an agricultural model that doesn’t just connect farmers with markets, but reshapes the economic dynamics of the rural north.

“This is a model of inclusive innovation,” said Rodrigo Madrazo García de Lomana, CEO of EDFI Management Company. As climate-conscious agriculture and inclusive growth become urgent priorities, Complete Farmer’s approach reflects a shift in how agriculture can be built from the ground up.

While Ghana’s long struggle for rural economic equity continues, Complete Farmer is making a calculated bet that connecting farms to infrastructure, financing, and global markets can make agriculture work, not just for the optics of growth metrics, but for the farmers themselves.

PaidHR started with the simple idea of helping Nigeria’s businesses pay their staff reliably. Four years later, the Lagos-based HR-tech startup is making a case for itself as something more ambitious: an ecosystem for salaries, benefits, and the payments that link them.

Its new USD 1.8 M seed round, announced today and led by Accion Venture Lab, marks a pivotal moment in that evolution.

Since launching in 2020, PaidHR has ridden Nigeria’s brutal economic tides, finding ways to survive a currency devaluation that wiped out 70% of the naira’s value and shaped how businesses and staff think about their money.

What began as a basic HR and payroll tool has evolved into a multi-currency payments engine, a trend reshaping HR-tech globally.

Just as Rippling and Deel added wallets and cards to deepen their user relationships, PaidHR has leveraged Nigeria’s payroll pain points to build an employee wallet that now processes over NGN 1.3 B a month (roughly USD 835 K) from staff choosing to spend within the app itself.

For co-founder and CEO Seye Bandele, it’s about making “spending where you earn” seamless. An employee can draw earned wages early (basically get loaned a portion of pay before payday), pay for data, airtime, and transport in-app, and even hedge devaluation by converting salaries into other currencies.

This cross-border payroll feature — supporting 49 currencies — allows firms to pay staff globally, making PaidHR a conduit for dollar and euro revenues that were elusive in Nigeria’s crisis-hit market.

In a country where small firms struggle with fragmented banking and broken operational flows, PaidHR has quietly built a multi-layered model.

Its subscription payroll service captures businesses, its Earned Wage Access (EWA) feature delivers a liquidity cushion for staff, and its wallet captures transaction margins from daily expenses.

Meanwhile, the cross-border product taps into FX spreads as global firms hire African talent. And, PaidHR reportedly has partnerships in place with licensed fintechs like Risevest to offer savings and FX investment options directly from the wallet. 

The results have been telling. By the end of 2024, PaidHR processed NGN 29 B in salaries, more than doubling its tally at the end of the prior year. Its total funding now stands at USD 2.9 M (it raised USD 500 K and USD 600 K in two previous rounds), and its growth mirrors Nigeria’s shift from a market reliant on raw human effort to one increasingly shaped by embedded finance.

PaidHR plans to deepen its market share within Nigeria, accelerate product development, and expand its customer success teams with the latest round of funding.

Bandele doesn’t call PaidHR a fintech, but its direction suggests as much. What started as a SaaS HR tool is quickly becoming an infrastructure platform for African salaries, capturing value every step of the way. That looks a winning formula in a market where margins are thin and trust is rare.

Chowdeck, one of Africa’s fastest-rising delivery startups, has acquired Mira, a startup offering point-of-sale and business management software for food and hospitality businesses. The terms of the deal are undisclosed.

It’s a move that signals Chowdeck’s intention to be not only a delivery app but a robust tech infrastructure partner for Africa’s fragmented restaurant and hospitality sector.

Launched in Nigeria in late 2021, Chowdeck built its reputation on speed, enabling meals, groceries, and essentials to reach customers in under 30 minutes across 11 cities where it’s gained over 1.5 million users and deployed more than 20,000 riders.

However, like delivery startups globally, the Y Combinator-backed startup is not immune to the harsh realities of thin logistics margins and fleeting user growth. The Mira acquisition hints at a deeper strategy to own the tools restaurants use behind the scenes, not just the last mile to customers’ doors.

Mira, founded in 2022 by ex-Flutterwave exec Ted Oladele, addresses Africa’s hospitality tech gap, providing restaurants with all-in-one software to manage sales, inventory, kitchen operations, and customer engagement.

Used by over 500 businesses, its platform has been praised for blending empathy for Africa’s operational chaos — unreliable supply chains, stockouts, and infrastructure gaps — with modern software design.

In a region where poor inventory management routinely eats into restaurant profits, Mira’s tools promise to help brands move from inventory headaches to operational clarity.

By acquiring Mira, Chowdeck joins a broader global playbook where delivery companies seek to entrench themselves beyond transactional deliveries.

The deal is part of a growing trend where delivery platforms evolve beyond customer ordering and fulfillment. Similar moves have been seen globally, from DoorDash’s acquisition of Bbot to Delivery Hero’s stake in TabSquare, as the biggest players seek to deepen relationships with restaurants by embedding themselves in every corner of the operational workflow.

By acquiring Mira, Chowdeck is betting it can do the same in African markets, making itself harder to displace, increasing the lifetime value of merchant relationships, and extracting new revenue streams from SaaS and payments.

The shared aim is to become the operating system for restaurants, not just the courier. This integration helps lock in partners, boost margins, and reduce reliance on ever-costlier delivery logistics.

For Chowdeck, the Mira deal also reflects a bet on where growth lies. While consumers expect faster delivery and slicker apps, food businesses are crying out for smarter operational support, especially as competition and consumer demands rise.

Combining delivery speed with operational intelligence could give Chowdeck a competitive edge as it expands beyond Nigeria to markets like Ghana and potentially other major African cities.

As Femi Aluko, CEO and co‑founder of Chowdeck, puts it, Mira brings “deep experience in solving operational challenges” for food businesses. Meanwhile, the deal brings Mira’s CEO, Oladele, into Chowdeck as head of product; a sign that the acquisition is as much about talent as tech.

Chowdeck now looks to position itself as the indispensable partner for African restaurants trying to scale amid local complexities. The big question now is whether this delivery-cum-SaaS strategy can deliver the notoriously elusive profitability in a sector infamous for burning cash at the altar of convenience.