A Cape Town-based fintech that was still a division of an international calling platform just fifteen months ago has closed a $2.1m seed funding round, bringing its total capital raised to more than $3m and signalling growing international appetite for African payments infrastructure. The round was led by Newion Partners, a European venture capital firm focused exclusively on business-to-business software, and will be used to expand NjiaPay’s engineering and commercial teams, deepen integrations with payment providers, and accelerate its expansion across African markets.
NjiaPay was spun out of Talk360 — an app enabling low-cost international calls to mobile and landline numbers — in December 2024. The separation followed a period during which Talk360’s own engineering team built an internal payment orchestration system to manage the complexity of operating across multiple African markets. That internal tool proved so effective that it was productised and launched as a standalone business. CEO Jonatan Allback brings 15 years of merchant-focused payments experience, having previously worked at Adyen for over eight years and scaled global payment operations for companies including Amazon, Netflix and Uber. Co-founder Roderick Simons, serving as chief product and technology officer, was formerly CTO of Yolt, a European open banking platform. The combination of regulated European payments expertise and direct exposure to Africa’s operational environment is central to the company’s pitch to investors and merchants alike.
The problem NjiaPay is solving is structural. Merchants operating across Africa routinely rely on several payment service providers simultaneously to maintain transaction approval rates, support local payment methods — such as mobile money, USSD, and digital wallets — and ensure redundancy when one provider fails. Managing multiple integrations creates reporting complexity, reconciliation headaches, and performance volatility that feeds directly into revenue loss. NjiaPay’s platform sits above a merchant’s existing payment stack, routing transactions in real time to whichever provider is most likely to succeed, then consolidating all performance data into a single dashboard. If one provider fails mid-transaction, the system switches to another automatically.
The scale of the payment failure problem in Africa is considerable. South Africa’s fintech sector attracted 70% of the country’s total startup funding in 2024, a dominance that reflects the structural importance of financial infrastructure to the broader digital economy. Within that, subscription and recurring revenue businesses are among the most exposed to payment risk — approximately one in five transactions fail due to expired or replaced card details alone. NjiaPay is addressing this specifically through the planned introduction of Card Account Updater to the South African market, a tool that has been standard in Europe for over a decade but remains largely unused locally. The technology automatically refreshes stored card details, reducing the involuntary churn that subscription businesses often misattribute to customer dissatisfaction.
Talk360, the company’s founding client and most visible case study, consolidated six payment provider integrations into one after implementing NjiaPay. The change produced a 25% increase in checkout conversion in key markets. Since then, the client base has expanded to include Anytime Fitness and Melon Mobile. The company employs approximately 20 people across offices in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and its Amsterdam headquarters, a structure that reflects its dual identity as both a European-backed B2B software business and an Africa-focused payments infrastructure provider.
According to TechCabal, Talk360 itself raised R22m in a separate funding round last month to expand its customer base and develop a digital goods trading service, underscoring the continued momentum of the ecosystem from which NjiaPay emerged. Talk360 has raised $10m in total since 2022 and counts more than six million customers across its markets.
- Business Explainer