African fintech startup, Flutterwave, has reportedly raised $250 million in its latest Series D funding round, tripling its valuation to over $3 billion in only twelve months.
The round was led by B Capital Group and saw the participation of Whale Rock Capital, Lux Capital, and Alta Park Capital, along with the startup’s existing investors, Tiger Global, Avenir Growth, Glynn Capital, Salesforce Ventures, and Green Visor.
According to the company’s statement, the funding will be used towards the development of complementary products, accelerating the startup’s expansion plans of customer acquisition in existing markets, as well as in its growth via M&A,.
Flutterwave, founded in 2016 by a team of finance and tech professionals, facilitates seamless cross-border payments and transactions for a wide range of businesses in Africa, whether small or large, via one application programming interface (API).
It also helps foreign businesses expand their operations in Africa and counts Uber, Booking.com, and Flywire as some of its international clients.
Based in Lagos with headquarters in San Francisco, the startup had raised $170 million in its previous Series C round around March last year, where it reached a valuation of $1 billion.
The payments giant has an infrastructure reach across 34 African nations and processes 200 million transactions worth more than $16 billion, with increasing numbers of businesses that are making use of its platform.
It has 900,000 global businesses that are using its platform for processing their payments in 150 different currencies with various payment modes, such as mobile wallets, bank transfers, local and international cards, as well as its consumer product Barter.
Many tech stakeholders have been waiting for Flutterwave to go public, however, co-founder and CEO, Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola, said that firm currently has no plans for IPO and is focusing on growing and scaling instead.
The startup also established an e-commerce solution, Flutterwave Market, with which small businesses and merchants can create an online shop at zero cost, as well as a remittance service, Send, with which users can send or receive money from each other in the continent.
Source credit: https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/16/african-fintech-flutterwave-triples-valuation-to-over-3b-after-250m-series-d/