South African financial technology startup Stitch announced a seed extension of $2 Million after initially raising $4 Million in seed funding earlier in the year. This comes as the fintech announced its entry into Africa’s largest market, the Nigerian market.
This latest fundraising brings the total amount of seed funding raised by Stitch to $6 Million.
Stitch is an Application Programming Interface (API) fintech startup that allows developers to connect applications to financial accounts within minutes, thereby allowing their users to share their transactions balances and histories, confirm their identities and initiate payments. The company announced Benjamin Dada as its Nigerian country manager.
Nigeria already has a lot of players involved in the API space and Stitch would be competing with the likes of Mono, Okra, and OnePipe.
Investors in this round include existing investors such as CRE, Village Global, 500 Fintech, Raba, Firstminute Capital, Future Africa. New investors such as Tom Blomfield, co-founder of Monzo, Matt Robinson, co-founder of GoCardless, Emilie Choi, President and COO of Coinbase, and Charlie Delingpole, founder of ComplyAdvantage also participated in the round. Some of the clients of Stitch include Chipper Cash, Paystack, Franc, Sanlam, Yoco, and Flexclub.
Stitch co-founder and CEO Kiaan Pillay said “Our goal is to become the go-to partner for any businesses building financial products in Africa. Access to the infrastructure Stitch is building can better enable these businesses to develop increasingly innovative solutions. They can now move money and access critical customer account data, while saving on costs, in hours rather than months.”
Tom Blomfield, an Investor in Stitch and co-founder of Monzo and GoCardless said “I see a lot of potential in African markets, where the wave of digital finance innovation is really beginning to gain momentum, and the Stitch team is getting in at precisely the right time. The team is one of the best I’ve seen globally, and I’m excited to see them continue to grow in Nigeria and beyond.”