Grace Ashiru
Talk360, a South African app that makes international calls cheap and reliable, has raised an extra $3 million, bringing its seed round total to $7 million. This is almost five months after it closed its first seed round.
Talk360 will use the money to grow its market share in South Africa, speed up its growth in the rest of Africa, and be the first company to launch a pan-African payment platform in 2023.
The company was started in 2016 by Dutch business people Hans Osnabrugge, Jorne Schamp, and South African entrepreneur Dean Hiine. So far this year, it has connected 2.3 million people worldwide. China says it has hired twice as many people this year because it wants to grow the business quickly.
“Our goal is to bridge distances and bring people together by providing reliable, affordable, and easy-to-use digital services to all communities, especially those in developing countries, so that they can connect to the rest of the world,” said Heine. However, in addition to resolving socioeconomic concerns, we also provide opportunities for microentrepreneurship and revenue generation to our expanding network of agents across the country.
The key to Talk360’s success in South Africa is its agent model. Agents get paid for every customer they bring in. Over the past year, the number of agents has grown by 33%, and the company has acquired over 800% more customers. This is part of the company’s plan to build micro-entrepreneurship, bring income opportunities and jobs to areas that don’t have enough of them, and grow its footprint.
The CEO of Kalon, Clive Butkow, said that the Talk360 team had “a wealth of experience” in South Africa and across the continent regarding communications. We are pleased to add this investment to the Kalon portfolio, and we feel that it has the potential to scale across Africa rapidly,” he explained. Ian Lessem, a managing partner at HAVAC, said that the fact that Talk360’s initial seed round target was oversubscribed shows how well it has done so far and how much it can grow.
In light of Talk360’s impressive performance in the South African market thus far and the opportunities it presents across the rest of Africa, we decided to increase our investment in the company. Since our initial investment, the company has demonstrated remarkable expansion and a genuine capacity to meet the challenge of achieving widespread distribution across Africa.
Lessem says, “We’ve seen the company turn consumers into paying customers by giving them useful services and making them easy to access in a cheap, reliable, and trustworthy way.”.”Tjaart van der Walt said that the Tyme founders were putting investing in the company because Talk360 makes it cheaper for millions of people in remote areas to make and receive calls.
“We think this will be a problem for a long time. He said, “We believe in the Talk360 team because they are passionate, have a clear goal, and can get things done.”Heine thinks that its pan-African payment platform, which will come out in 2023, will help Talk360 grow even more. Users from around the continent can make purchases on the new platform with any currency of their choice, in addition to more than 160 other payment options. It will also be available to other business owners.
This year alone, Talk360 has added six new currencies, added ways to pay specific to Africa, like OTT vouchers, and grown its partnerships with local solutions, like Kazang and Blu vouchers.
