Tech in Africa
San Francisco-based cross-border tech startup Klasha announced raising $2.4 million in seed funding building technology infrastructure for cross-border finance across Africa. The investment round was led by Greycroft alongside participation from Seedcamp, Berrywood Capital, Practical VC, AVG Basecamp Fund, First Round VC, Plug and Play, 2.12 Angels, Expert Dojo, MiLA Capital, and other angels among them Joe Cross (Ex-Marketing Head at Wise), Santosh Ankola (Ex-Head of Product at TechCrunch), and Michael Pennington at Gumtree.
The investment will help Klasha expand its technology in a way that helps international B2B and B2C businesses like Zoom, ASOS, Zara, and Amazon. The core technology behind Klasha allows African customers to pay offline and online international retailers with their African currencies. The retailers in turn receive payment in their dominant currencies, particularly GBP, USD, and EUR. Klasha currently remains available in Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana and helps drive up revenues by growing the current 10,000 customer base expanding into new markets with three more African counties set to go live in this year’s Q4.
Klasha payment link provides an easy and flexible way for international businesses to collect payments from their African customers without having to download an app or going through a website. A few clicks and a business will have a custom checkout page directly from their Klasha dashboard. The Klasha mobile app allows users to make both local and international calls using African currencies without any pressing restrictions. KlashaWire is a fast and easy way for businesses to pay their suppliers overseas using a preferred African currency, i.e Naira or cedis.
According to Klasha, the company has processed over 20,000 transactions across Africa achieving an average 366% MoM growth rate. The startup has further built platform integrations for OpenCart, WooComerce, and BigCommerce. This integration library is rapidly growing to accommodate more platforms such as Wix, Magneto, Ecwid, and Commerce Cloud. An official partnership with BigCommerce will see Klasha Checkout expand to reach thousands of e-commerce stores globally.
Klasha CEO and founder Jess Anuna pointed out that by 2025 half of the world’s population will live in Africa. Klasha is building the technology to “ facilitate frictionless cross-border payments” in addition to allowing “International businesses to scale seamlessly into Africa through our API”. Reshma Sohoni, a founding member at Seedcamp, said “Klasha is our first investment in Africa“.
We're incredibly excited to announce our first investment in Africa as we back Jess and her vision to build frictionless technology for cross-border commerce 💪
Read more on our investment here: https://t.co/q3Sf1U9mLg https://t.co/QxQf643hFn
— seedcamp (@seedcamp) October 7, 2021
