Stripe and Visa pour funds into Nigerian e-checkout firm Paystack

Stripe and Visa have extended their presence in emerging markets fintech through an investment in open technology toolkit provider Paystack.

Lagos, Nigeria-based payments startup and Y Combinator graduate, The Lagos-based Paystack, which is also a Y Combinator graduate, has raised $8 million in a Series A funding round.

Stripe led the round,, which was completed on Wednesday. Additional investors included Visa, as well as previous investors, China-based Tencent Holdings (owner of WeChat Pay), and Y Combinator, an accelerator that also had Stripe as a member.

“Paystack is highly technical and fanatically customer oriented. We’re excited to back such people in one of the world’s fastest-growing regions,” Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said Stripe in the announcement.

Paystack is similar to Stripe in that it provides payment APIs so developers can create online checkouts, create recurring billing systems and verify customer identities. The company has followed Stripe’s path in enabling merchants with a few lines of code to be able to monetize their mobile apps and create e-commerce businesses. Paystack claims to serve over 17,000 businesses and similar to Stripe, only charge a minimal fee for each successful transaction.

Paystack first received seed funding of $120,000 in 2016 when it enlisted in the Y Combinator startup accelerator program. It has had four more rounds of funding since the seed capital, including the most recent Series A, to bring its total capital raised to $9.5 million, according to Crunchbase, a website that tracks capital raised by fintech startups.