African fintech Flutterwave has raised $250 million in a Series D round that tripled the company’s valuation to over $3 billion. At $3 billion, Flutterwave is currently the highest valued African startup, surpassing the $2 billion valuation set by SoftBank-backed fintech OPay and FTX-backed cross-border payments platform Chipper Cash last year. 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. Flutterwave has seen astronomical growth since TechCrunch covered its unicorn round last year. At the time, the payments company said it processed 140 million transactions worth over $9 billion. A year later, the African payments giant, with an infrastructure reach across 34 countries on the continent, now processes 200 million transactions worth more than $16 billion. While Flutterwave’s market share in enterprise payments has primarily been responsible for this growth, diversifying into fintech products for small and medium businesses, retail and consumers also played a part.
After scaling its payments product across sub-Saharan Africa, Flutterwave has expanded its services up north to Egypt and Morocco. This is the first step of Flutterwave’s move into emerging markets such as the Middle East and Latin America. Although Flutterwave has its headquarters in the U.S., it didn’t run any operations there. Most of its U.S.-affiliated business involved striking partnerships with fintech giants such as PayPal, Visa, Discover and Worldpay FIS to facilitate global payments with Africa. he first public deal Flutterwave made was the acquisition of creator platform Disha for an undisclosed six-figure amount. The rationale behind the purchase was lost on some onlookers because Disha didn’t fit Flutterwave’s core payments business. Though Flutterwave enveloped Disha’s 20,000 creators or businesses (not all were active at the time of acquisition) and intends to play the long game of participating in the global creator economy, the immediate objective of the deal, it seemed, was to salvage a failing startup and back it with a robust payments checkout system. While some global investors have recently expressed concerns about the valuations of startups in the face of falling public tech stocks, others are increasing their risk appetite and Flutterwave’s deal reflects that reality. Its latest backers in this Series D round include lead investor B Capital Group and participating investors Alta Park Capital, Whale Rock Capital, and Lux Capital. Existing investors such as Avenir Growth, Tiger Global, Glynn Capital, Green Visor and Salesforce Ventures also doubled down.