South African online payments infrastructure firm Peach Payments has secured a $31 million series A fund to expand into new African markets with innovative merchant solutions.
The funding round was led by Apis Partners, an ESGI-native global private equity and venture capital asset manager that supports growth-stage financial services and financial infrastructure businesses by providing them with catalytic growth equity capital.
Speaking on the recent funds raised, Peach Payments Co-Founder and CEO Rahul Jain said the company’s mission is to enable African businesses and entrepreneurs to succeed in digital commerce, noting that the company seeks to be the infrastructure layer on which they build their business.
In his words, “We have witnessed incredible growth in the past three years driven by fundamental forces and shifts in consumer and business adoption of digital commerce. Across market segments from retail to digital learning, fitness, and even traditional financial services, we have boarded new clients in almost every vertical. We have built a very strong team with exceptional operators and I am excited to partner with the team at Apis and take this business to where it deserves to be”.
He added that the company intends to use the investment to accelerate its expansion across new African markets, deepen its product offering, and reinforce its core merchant value proposition.
Founded in 2012 in Cape Town, South Africa by Rahul Jain and Andreas Demleitner, Peach Payments since inception is known for offering high end-user conversion, best-in-class risk management, enterprise-grade products, and actionable insights backed by excellent customer support experience it offers to its merchants.
The payment giant also provides a toolkit that enables merchants to accept, manage and make payments via their mobile phones and through the web. Its services include online payment acceptance, payouts (disbursements), and subscription solutions across a variety of payment types including cards, electronic funds transfer, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), digital wallets, mobile money, and several others.
Peach Payments has so far experienced exceptional growth in recent years, with its revenue increasing more than 650% since 2020, and 80% in 2022 alone. The company expanded its operation to the East African country Kenya in 2018 and Mauritius in 2021.
Peach Payments is PCI DSS Level 1 compliant, with bank-enabled two-factor authentication and industry-leading fraud detection tools. The payments company selected ACI Worldwide, a software company providing real-time payment solutions to corporations to process digital payments, to deliver a payments gateway that would support its expansion goals and rapid merchant onboarding. Through this, it experienced 400% growth in monthly transaction volumes in the first year of implementation.
