Looking at large merchants, notably those that operate across a number of geographies are often required to support an array of payments methods, and, in turn, would require in-house technical work per payment integration. As such, the mission of startup MoneyHash for the notable regions.
Technically, this is totally an extensive process that has seen a number of Big Tech companies build dedicated teams to manage different connections, data, and cycles with the payments gateways due to remodeling of each platform to fit in the markets where they are present.
For instance, it is believed that in the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., payment orchestration platforms Zooz, Primer, and Spreedly take care of heavy lifting on behalf of merchants via a unified API. This, on the other hand, remained an untapped opportunity notably in Africa and the Middle East, where few companies bring transparency to these merchants’ payment stacks.
To shape this in Africa and the Middle East, Egypt and U.S.-based MoneyHash is poise to take the bull by the horn having emerged from beta with $3 million in pre-seed funding. And is poised to describe itself as the Middle East and Africa’s “first super-API for payment orchestration and revenue operations”.
The fresh fund viewed as an extension follows an undisclosed six-figure raised by the company that was announced last June from investors Kepple Africa Ventures, Ventures Platform, LoftyInc Capital, and lead COTU Ventures. Equally, The Middle Eastern early-stage fund also led the latest extension, with participation from previous backers in the initial pre-seed round and others such as Venture Friends, VentureSouq, The Continent Venture Partners, and First Check Africa. Also, in addition, are the angel investors that include Jake Gibson, NerdWallet’s Tim Chen, and Belvo’s Oriol Tintore.
Going forward, at the point when merchants and companies get their platforms off the ground, they primarily work with one or two payment processing providers, which over time, more payment providers are onboarded by these merchants in order to meet their growing needs as they get bigger and expand across multiple regions.
Therefore, it should be borne in mind that is no mean feat when it comes to integrating different payment stacks. Aside from the operational inefficiencies and technicalities involved, which often takes an in-house tech team three to ten weeks to complete integrations. While in the Middle East and Africa, the aforementioned problems are understood to be magnified due to differences in payment methods, currencies, and isolations between countries.
However, startup MoneyHash which was founded by ‘Mustafa Eid’, ‘Nader Abdelrazik’, and ‘Anisha Sekar’ was brought to the limelight with a combined experience of over 30 years working for companies like UpWork, Microsoft, NerdWallet, and Sigfig in late 2020.
As for the subject – MoneyHash functions by sitting on top of payment providers and offers its infrastructure as an extension of companies’ product backend. Hence, becoming their connection to the entire payment ecosystem in the market they operate.
According to the company CEO Abdelrazik, told a source familiar with the matter, “The idea of the super-API is that you consolidate the different payment accounts and build all of these features on top of it. MoneyHash becomes this one-stop-shop product, or payments stack that you put in your product and manage all of these different integrations and checkout experience in each of the African and Middle Eastern countries and have all your information on one dashboard”.
Meanwhile, while the company plans to integrate with payment providers in sub-Saharan Africa (notably serving Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa), Flutterwave, Paystack and Yoco are scheduled to follow suit, though, without specifics, MoneyHash which in 2021 onboarded 17 companies in order to use its sandbox environment to connect with its API and access payment gateways like PayTabs and Fawry will plug into different payments gateways and processors that are active in the Middle East and North Africa post-beta.
In view of this, the company stated that MoneyHash will use the fresh fund to accelerate its growth in the Middle East and Africa. And also plans to expand its team – at the moment 15 across the U.S., Egypt, the UAE, Nigeria, and some parts of Europe – and hire mid-level and senior software engineers.
“MoneyHash is led by three remarkable founders with deep knowledge of payments and acumen for product-led execution”, Amir Farha, founder of lead investor COTU Ventures, said in a statement. “They are attracting a great team of talent, and after their impressive beta run, their product is ready for prime time. We are excited to be part of their journey”.
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