MoneyHash which describes itself as the Middle East and Africa’s “first super-API for payment orchestration and revenue operations” has just raised $3 million in funding in its pre-seed funding round.
The pre-seed round which is an extension of an initial round, follows an undisclosed six-figure raise announced by the startup in June last year from investors COTU Ventures, LoftyInc, Ventures Platform and Kepple Africa Ventures. This round was led by COTU Ventures (It also led MoneyHash’s initial round) and saw the participation of First Check Africa, Venture Souq, The Continent Venture Partners, Nuwa Capital, Venture Friends, Nuwa Capital, and angel investors Tim Chen of NerdWallet, Oriol Tintore of Belvo and Jake Gibson of Better Tomorrow Ventures.
MoneyHash is the brainchild of founders Nader Abdelrazik, Mustafa Eid and Anisha Sekar who have a combined experience of more than 30 years working for big names such as UpWork, Sigfig and NerdWallet, founded MoneyHash in 2020.
MoneyHash’s infrastructure which it describes as a super-API is offered to companies as an extension of their product backend. Its infrastructure acts as the link to the entire payment ecosystem in the markets that these companies are present in. Services like MoneyHash are important to businesses and companies because it helps them manage their payments needs as they grow and expand into more markets characterized by their own peculiarities. This way, these businesses and companies are able to reduce inefficiencies and technical problems that may arise as a result of integrating different payment stacks.
As explained by CEO Nader Abdelrazik, “The idea of the super-API is that you consolidate the different payment accounts and build all of these features on top of it. MoneyHash becomes this one-stop-shop product, or payments stack that you put in your product and manage all of these different integrations and checkout experience in each of the African and Middle Eastern countries and have all your information on one dashboard”.
MoneyHash which currently serves clients in industries travel and tourism, e-commerce, remittances, etc., wants to grow out its clients. Users of MoneyHash’s infrastructure can easily integrate payment providers, embed a unified checkout system and access micro-services such as transaction routing, subscription management and invoicing on the platform. All these they get to enjoy without any hassle and at their convenience.
MoneyHash currently has 17 companies testing its sandbox for free. 5 out of these 17 are active and paying customers which MoneyHash charges between $150 and $1,000 on a monthly basis. This is dependent on the number of payment providers its client companies connect to. Excluding this, MoneyHash also charges transaction fees that begin at 10 cents and reduce as payments volume increases.
The kind of growth envisioned by MoneyHash has been likened to how Amazon’s AWS revolutionized cloud. According to founders, MoneyHash plans will see it become the AWS of payments in the Middle East and Africa. Its CEO said that “What AWS did to the cloud, where it made it easy for companies to build as many services on top of the infrastructure, we think the payment industry, especially in emerging markets, is very fragmented and needs an AWS for money, which MoneyHash is doing when you connect with it and build as much as you need without needing to change anything”.
In a statement from Amir Farha the founder of COTU Ventures, the lead investor of the round, MoneyHash was described as a game-changer led by remarkable founders. “MoneyHash is led by three remarkable founders with deep knowledge of payments and acumen for product-led execution. They are attracting a great team of talent, and after their impressive beta run, their product is ready for prime time. We are excited to be part of their journey”, he said.
The funds acquired from the round will be geared towards expanding in the Middle East and Africa, as well as increasing its team.
Paul Balo is the founder of TechBooky and a highly skilled wireless communications professional with a strong background in cloud computing, offering extensive experience in designing, implementing, and managing wireless communication systems.
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