Nigerian fintech startup Paystack has raised $1.3m in seed funding from Tencent, Comcast Ventures, Singularity Investments and other international investors.

Participating investors included Spark, M&S Partners, Tokyo Founders Fund, Blue Rinc Capital, Pave Investments, KIBS-CFY Partners, Michael Siebel, Justin Kan, Olumide Soyombo, Leonard Stiegeler and a number of Angels.

Paystack, is a payment system that allows African businesses to accept payments from customers all around the world. 

The company’s ultimate goal is to solve the various problems surrounding online payments in Africa.

Launched in 2015 by Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi, the company currently runs its operations from Silicon Valley and Lagos, Nigeria.

The investment will be used to build out its engineering team in Lagos, as well grow its sales and marketing operations, to accelerate product development and customer onboarding.

At present, businesses on the continent struggle to integrate and keep up with many different payment options on offer. 

Paystack is completely platform agnostic – it does not favour one payment platform over any other – something unique in African fintech, which is currently very fragmented.

Merchants who sign up for Paystack can receive live payments from customers within 30 minutes of integration and the product allows for recurring billing.

Shola Akinlade, Paystack CEO, said: “Having painstakingly identified the many barriers that merchants on the continent have when it comes to online payments, we have built and refined a product for Africa that we hope will act as a catalyst for the continent’s online economy, be it on-demand services, ecommerce, travel & hospitality, financial services or entertainment.” 

We know Africa’s digital economy has potential, many billions of dollars of potential, we simply need to unlock it and make businesses work better, faster and more effectively. Paystack will do this. Thanks to the backing from our investors with today’s announcement, and our time spent with Y Combinator, we are now in the strongest position yet to resolve the disconnect between African businesses and accepting payments.”

Paystack is launching its service in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and most populous economy, before rolling out the service across the continent. 

Nigerian businesses collected about $150bn last year, most of which was collected offline. However the digital economy on the continent is growing fast, and Nigeria alone currently sees 6 million new Internet users every year. 

As mobile adoption continues at a torrid pace, with 400 million more smartphone connections by 2020 expected, the continent will need a reliable payments platform to support growth in online transactions.

Now moving out of beta, Paystack has partnered with some of Nigeria’s leading Internet companies iROKOtv, Jobberman, Payporte, and Hotels.ng, to facilitate fast, safe payments. 

The payment platform has also built a strong following amongst Nigeria’s technology community, as over 30 independent developers have built additional plug-ins and tools for Paystack, using the company’s REST APIs and client libraries.

“Paystack is addressing a massive market, helping businesses accept payments online in less than 30 minutes from sign-up,” said Christian Ebersol, Associate at Comcast Ventures. 

“We look forward to supporting this talented team as they streamline the payment process between merchants and consumers.”