Flutterwave, one of Africa’s biggest fintech companies, announced today that they’ve raised $250 million in Series D funding, which tripled the company’s valuation to over $3 billion in just twelve months as the brand continues to transform.
Led by founder and CEO Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, Flutterwave facilitates cross-border payments transactions of small to large businesses in Africa via one API. The company also helps businesses outside Africa expand their operations on the continent. Some of its international clients include Booking.com, Flywire and Uber.
According to TechCrunch, In March 2021, the San Francisco-headquartered and Lagos-based startup raised $170 million in a Series C round from Tiger Global and Avenir at a valuation of $1 billion. The latest financing, which confirms a Bloomberg scoop from October, brings Flutterwave’s total raise since its inception six years ago to $475 million (it raised a $35 million Series B in 2020 and a $20 million Series A in 2018). At $3 billion, Flutterwave is currently the highest valued African startup, surpassing the $2 billion valuations set by SoftBank-backed fintech OPayand FTX-backed cross-border payments platform Chipper Cash last year. It was also the same month the company grew to 290,000; now, 900,000 businesses globally use Flutterwave to process payments in 150 currencies and across different payment modes: local and international cards, mobile wallets, bank transfers and its consumer product Barter.
In the future, Flutterwave will look at acquisitions that will further consolidate its authority in the fintech space. And as the payments giant continues to deepen its influence in the SMB and consumer fintech space, we can speculate that smaller startups — including those it has backed, like CinetPay — may become acquisition targets.
We plan to grow inorganically through acquisitions, and it will happen when we find a fit and see a company with the same core values or culture and goal of making payments simpler across emerging markets. So we still have plans for that.
said CEO & Founder, Olugbenga “GB” Agboola.
