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Kenyan fintech startup, Wapi Pay, has raised a $2.2 million pre-seed fund to facilitate financial transactions between the African and Asian continents.
Investors that took part in the round include MSA Capital, EchoVC, Kepple Africa, Future Hub, Transsion Holdings and Gobi Ventures.
Expressing his confidence in the startup, Tim Chen, vice president at MSA Capital, said:
“Africa to Asia is a large trading corridor overlooked and underserved by tech today. We believe Wapi Pay is the best team to build the necessary infrastructure to support its growing trade volumes. We are excited to support them with our extensive China fintech network and playbook.”
Asides Kenya, the startup has its reach in China, Indonesia, India, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, and seeks to expand even further.
The startup was founded by Paul Ndichu and Eddie Ndichu, two brothers with the zeal to solve the issue of expensive financial transactions between Africa and Asia.
“We started Wapi Pay having seen how fragmented the payment infrastructure is and how horrifying the experience and expense of making or receiving a payment to and from Asia,” said Paul Ndichu in an interview with TechCrunch.
Speaking further, Paul said:
“We spent some time in Asia, given the growing trade relationship between the two corridors [Africa and Asia], and saw the growing need to make this more efficient, faster and cheaper, evolving from remittances to global payments. These transactions are already complex in nature; how do we make them as simple and easy as mobile money?”
Eddie Ndichu reiterated the company’s ambition to optimise efficiency and effectiveness in its service delivery to users.
“Wapi Pay bypasses traditional payment networks, optimising efficiency and cost for our customers. Users choose the delivery channels they want, such as bank to bank, wallet to wallet, bank to wallet and wallet to bank options to transfer funds as well as make merchant payments, with settlement done within 24 hours,” He said.
Since its establishment in 2019, the startup claims to have a growth rate of 396% annually and seeks to process $500 million in remittances by the end of next year, acquiring greater achievements.
“These funds will help Wapi Pay diversify our product range and drive growth so that we can evolve remittances into real-time global cross-border payments, starting with Africa and Asia. All while minimising the cost of transactions, it needs to be as easy as sending M-PESA,” Eddie concluded.
Added to making payments between Africa and Asia easy and convenient, the platform also supports organisations and institutions in processing bulk payments, including salary payments and business purchases.
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