The round is led by The Spruce House Partnership, with participation from PayPal Ventures, TrueLayer, firstminute capital, The Raba Partnership, CRE Venture Capital, Village Global, Zinal Growth (the investment vehicle of Checkout.com founder Guillaume Pousaz) and others, including founders of Chipper Cash, Quovo and Unit
14 February, 2022. Cape Town, South Africa – API fintech company Stitch today announced a $21 million Series A funding round, led by The Spruce House Partnership. Stitch will use the funding to continue building the future of money movement by linking bank accounts, wallets and other stores of value, creating what it refers to as the “financial graph.” Its payments and data infrastructure enables players across the fintech ecosystem — which is traditionally fragmented by technical, commercial and political barriers — to transact seamlessly, expand their revenue and growth potential, and significantly reduce conversion time and cost.
“We are incredibly fortunate to be supported by some of the best investors, founders and builders in the fintech space globally,” said Stitch co-founder & CEO Kiaan Pillay. “They are working closely with us to enable the boom we’re seeing in financial technology on the continent. Across the hundreds of customers we work with, big and small, we’re witnessing a record pace of development of new financial products. Our goal is to help fast-growing fintech and embedded finance companies more easily launch increasingly innovative and tailored products, expand into new markets and optimize their solutions – so they can grow even faster.”
Today, businesses interested in using Stitch can get started immediately via its self-service portal. The Stitch API enables businesses to easily access and link their users’ financial accounts to:
- Initiate secure bank transfers for one-click pay-ins and payouts.
- Access standardized and categorized transaction history and balance data, for affordability checks and income estimation assessments.
- Verify account information and ownership, to enable faster and more user-friendly digital onboarding, and to perform fraud checks.
Startups in Africa raised a record $4 billion in 2021, with the vast majority (estimated 62%) going to fintechs. Stitch serves these fast-growing businesses, from wallet-based companies like Chipper Cash, Luno and Zapper, to financial services providers like ImaliPay, to subscription and e-commerce players like FlexClub, to PSPs and payment aggregators like Peach and Yoco. As embedded finance continues to gain traction and further adoption of digital finance solutions, the opportunity to provide foundational software that can enable businesses to launch, optimize and scale fintech solutions will only accelerate.
“We have been following startups in Africa for many years. Our diligence was very clear that this is one of the most talented teams on the continent, and we are excited to be a part of what they are building at Stitch,” said Ben Stein, co-founder of The Spruce House Partnership.
The funding will be used to significantly expand the team, launch new product offerings and enter new markets across the continent. In addition to Spruce House Capital, new investors include PayPal Ventures, TrueLayer and Zinal Growth, among others. Existing investors including firstminute capital, The Raba Partnership, CRE Venture Capital and Village Global also participated, as did founders of leading global fintechs including Chipper Cash, Quovo and Unit. The company had announced a $6 million seed round last year after it emerged from stealth in February 2021.
“Stitch is building critical infrastructure to enable faster, easier and more secure payments across Africa,” said Ashish Aggarwal, Director at PayPal Ventures. “We believe they will play a significant role in contributing to the overall growth of the fintech space in Africa – and are excited to be investing at this important moment in their journey.”
In the last quarter alone, the company saw 44% MoM customer growth and a 72% MoM increase in linked financial accounts on the platform. It’s had 104% MoM growth in payments value since launch.
ABOUT STITCH
Stitch is an API fintech company that enables businesses to more quickly and easily build, optimize and scale financial products across Africa. Stitch offers data and payments solutions that dramatically reduce the effort required for businesses to connect to their users’ financial accounts and enable bank-to-bank payments without leaving the existing app interface. Their infrastructure-led approach supports a number of different use cases, including KYC & onboarding, personal and business financial management, lending, wallet top-ups, e-commerce checkouts, and more.
Stitch launched in February 2021 and has offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa and Lagos, Nigeria. Learn more at stitch.money.
