Flutterwave today announced that it has successfully acquired Disha, a creator platform that had planned to close up since February.
Disha is a platform based in Nigeria which allows digital creators to curate, sell digital content and receive payments from their audiences globally. According to TechCrunch, Disha had stated prior to the closing up announcement that it had successfully bootstrapped to more than 20,000 users. It even claimed to have a monthly growth rate of 100% at some point.
Three days after announcing the shutdown, Disha mentioned that it was thinking of new options for the company and would announce when a decision had been made about its future. That decision was announced when Flutterwave told TechCrunch in an email that it had bought the two-year old Disha. Earlier this month, a sharp-eyed Twitter user noticed that Flutterwave’s support documents housed Disha’s FAQs. This was a nod to the (possible) acquisition of Disha by Flutterwave. The FAQs were subsequently removed from Flutterwave in a bid to kill any suspicions before an official announcement was made.
Flutterwave quickly became a Nigerian favourite in October 2020 when the company set up a fund to assist the nationwide protest against Police Brutality. The fund set up by Flutterwave helped to raise over N25m before it was deactivated. The deactivation of the donation link was met with strong criticism from the young Nigerians who believed that the Central Bank of Nigeria was behind it, in order to frustrate the efforts of the young Nigerians trying to protest against police brutality and injustice.
Disha reportedly shut down due to low-income revenues; the company reportedly made slightly over $1,000 in monthly revenue. Even the ex-CEO of Disha confirmed that Disha showed clear signs of struggle, with limited resources and little revenue. Ex-CTO of Disha, Rufus Oyemade praised the recently completed deal with Flutterwave, saying that the deal had provided a way to drive value for creators while sustaining revenue and the business.
“We [the founders] decided to shut down the company because we ran out of resources to continue driving the very valid vision we had,” ex-CTO Oyemade told TechCrunch in an email. “With Flutterwave, we now have a way to drive both value for creators and revenue to sustain the business. We are happy to have gotten the call from Flutterwave, which actually kept hopes alive.”
Flutterwave has been rumoured to have acquired smaller companies in the past, but the company had never come forward to confirm those rumours. That was until Disha came along, and Flutterwave sent that fateful email to TechCrunch. The decision by Flutterwave to publicly announce its acquisition of Disha is a huge show of faith in the potential of the business deal.