San Francisco and Lagos-based Flutterwave has raised $35 million in Series B funding that CEO Olugbenga "GB" Agboola said will go directly towards expanding the fintech firm's presence in Africa.
"For the new capital, the goal is to pretty much double down on our expansion in Africa," Agboola told Cheddar.
The payment technology firm, which helps merchants and consumers process transactions online and at the point-of-sale, is banking on Africa's youth demographic to drive growth.
"If you look at Nigeria, for example, population is 200 million-plus people, average age is between 20 to 30 — that has been the driving force of our expansion strategy," Agboola said.
The company, which counts Uber and Booking.com among its clients, currently operates in Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa, and has plans to expand to Zambia, Malawi, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Morocco, and Egypt.
"Africa is a massive consumer of everything from the West," Agboola said.
He added that many young Africans subscribe to Netflix or Spotify and buy products like Apple AirPods. His goal is to better connect these consumers to the global market, and, on the flip side, make it easier for local merchants to sell their wares to anyone in the world.
Rather than entering one market at a time, Flutterwave is trying to quickly expand its footprint across the continent and become the payment option of choice for millions of young Africans.
"One big differentiator that we have is we see Africa as one market," Agboola said.
Partnerships with Visa and Worldpay have already helped Flutterwave expand its customer base globally. Now it plans to use the latest round of funding to hire additional business development staff and technology developers to lead the expansion into more countries.
The World Economic Forum says false and misleading information supercharged with cutting-edge artificial intelligence is the top immediate risk to the global economy.
CES 2024 starts this week in Las Vegas. It's set to feature swaths of the latest advances and gadgets across personal tech, transportation, health care, sustainability and more. Here's a list of the coolest announcements so far.
Astronauts will have to wait until next year before flying to the moon and another few years before landing on it. NASA on Tuesday announced the latest round of delays in its Artemis moon-landing program.
The Biden administration has enacted a new labor rule that aims to prevent the misclassification of workers as independent contractors. The labor department rule going into effect Tuesday replaces a scrapped Trump-era standard that lowered the bar for classifying employees as contractors
The KC-46 was to be the ideal candidate for a fixed-price development program. Instead, it has cost Boeing billions, and made industry wary of such deals.
Dave Long, CEO and Co-Founder of Orangetheory Fitness joins Cheddar to chat trends in the industry for 2024. He updates us on the company's plans to expand and what the state of the economy has meant for business.
One of the world's largest renewable energy developers will be getting hundreds of wind turbines from General Electric spinoff GE Vernova as part of a record equipment order and long-term service deal.
A moon landing attempt by a private US company appears doomed because of a fuel leak on the newly launched spacecraft. Astrobotic Technology managed to orient the lander toward the sun Monday so its solar panel could capture sunlight and charge its onboard battery.
