PalmPay, an Africa-focused payments startup, raised a $100 million Series A round last year. This information was discovered by reporters in Partech Africa’s latest end-of-year report on African venture capital investments.
Further research in Crunchbase and Tracxn — platforms that track funding rounds in startups and private companies around the world — reveals that the round was closed in August 2021.
PalmPay entered the Nigerian payments market in June 2019. Five months later, it launched with a $40 million seed round — the largest of its kind on the continent — from Chinese investors including Chinese phone manufacturer Transsion through its Tecno subsidiary, NetEase, and wireless communications hardware firm Mediatek.
The U.K.-based startup also received funding from Chinese investors for its Series A round, which was the second largest of its kind after unicorn Wave’s $200 million. China-based Chuangshi Capital, Yunshi Equity Investment Management, Trust Capital, Chengyu Capital, and private equity fund AfricaInvest were among the investors in the round.
PalmPay provides a variety of financial services to both individual consumers and merchants. It offers online payment and offline POS-acquiring services to merchants through its PalmPartner app, and it plans to launch digital marketing services soon. Consumers can choose from a variety of services, including no-fee payment options, low-cost transfers, bill payments, rewards programs, and discounted airtime.
PalmPay has expanded to Ghana since its Nigerian launch in 2019, according to its website, and now serves over 5 million users. According to some sources, the monthly transaction volume for PalmPay was more than $100 million as of June 2021. PalmPay’s partnership with Chinese mobile brands Tecno, Infinx, and itel, which includes pre-installation of the startup’s app on 20 million phones, is critical to its growth, at least in Nigeria.
PalmPay stated in a 2019 statement that it aspires to be Africa’s largest financial services platform. That is why it expanded into Ghana. However, there is still work to be done in order to become the dominant player in a mobile payment space that is rapidly heating up. According to information from its most recent funding round, its main competitor, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Sequoia Capital China-backed OPay, has 8 million users and monthly transaction volumes exceeding $3 billion. The unicorn can be found in Nigeria and Egypt.
