pawaPay is a payments technology company built specifically for mobile money — the de facto financial infrastructure for hundreds of millions of Africans. Through one API and one dashboard, businesses can collect payments, send payouts and process remittances into mobile money wallets across 20 live African markets, covering 85% of all mobile money in Africa and 520 million of the continent’s 650 million active wallets. Spun out of betPawa in 2020 and led by CEO Nikolai Barnwell, pawaPay made an early, focused bet on mobile money while competitors concentrated on cards and banking — building direct connections with mobile network operators including MTN, Airtel, Safaricom, Orange, Vodafone and Telecel rather than layering on aggregators.

The scale is significant: 5 million transactions a day, over €10 billion in payments settled, nearly 2 billion successful transactions — with zero chargebacks, a structural advantage of mobile money over cards — and a 91.3 NPS score, with mobile money operators themselves rating pawaPay 9+/10 on support and trust. Enterprise compliance is included, with specialised assistance for regulated industries, and merchants settle in local or global currencies, on schedule or on request. Customers and partners include Bolt, Yango, LemFi, Yellow Card, GiveDirectly and betPawa. Its market footprint spans Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, DRC, Gabon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Backed by a $9 million seed round co-led by 88mph and MSA Capital, with participation from Mr Eazi’s Zagadat Capital, Kepple and Vunani Capital.