Cape Town Startup Stitch Receives $4 Million In Seed Funding
Cape Town Startup Stitch Receives $4 Million In Seed Funding. South African fintech startup Stitch has secured $4-million in a seed round of funding co-led by First Minute Capital and Raba along with several other global investors including the founders of Venmo, CRE, Village Global, Klarna founder Niklas Adalberth Klarna, Flutterwave, the founding team from Plaid and Revolut and Paystack.
“Today the news of our $4M seed round became public, and we left stealth mode behind. Raba and First Minute Capital led an outstanding group of investors, more impressive and experienced than we could have hoped to be involved when we started out with just 3 engineers and a broken payments app.” the company said on its website.
The funding will be used to expand the startup’s team and launch its operations in West and East Africa. According to reports, this is the largest investment to date in a pure-play African fintech infrastructure company and one of the largest seed-stage fintech investments raised in Africa.
Kiaan Pillay, co-founder, and CEO of Stitch told Venture Burn that, “It makes no sense that we’re still building financial services the same way we did 15 years ago. There’s an incredible opportunity to provide a new generation of financial services in South Africa and across other African markets. At Stitch, we enable smart people in the ecosystem to unlock this potential and build amazing products and services, powered by our infrastructure.”
The Stitch team hold deep experience building fintech and developer-facing products in Africa. It started building the Stitch API to make it easier for African fintech developers to create new, improved, more ambitious products.
“We started Stitch because we think building fintech is broken in Africa today. Compliance is hard and there’s no infrastructure, making building products painful and slow — and expensive. We raised this round because we want to solve this problem in a hurry, and across Africa. We’ve created developer-centric API infrastructure, where we handle all the hard stuff, like security, privacy and compliance. We want to make fintech accessible and affordable, enabling domain innovators to innovate.” Pillay told Venture Burn.
