Verto, a Nigerian B2B payments platform that allows small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) to pay their suppliers in over 200 countries and 39 currencies, has secured a US$10 million Series A investment to expand its geographical reach.
The Treasury, Middle East Venture Partners (MEVP), TMT Investments, Unicorn Growth Capital, Zrosk Investments, and P1 Ventures all participated in a US$10 million Series A fundraising round lead by Quona Capital. Verto plans to use the funds to further develop its platform and expand its geographic reach into other African emerging countries.
Verto, founded in 2018 by Ola Oyetayo and Anthony Oduwole, is a fast and seamless worldwide payments platform that employs a marketplace solution to efficiently match businesses, especially when one of the currency pairs is an illiquid currency.
“While other peer-to-peer payment systems often have transaction limits,” Oyetayo explained, “the Verto platform supports payment amounts that are ideal for MSMEs.”
“With this money, we hope to grow our presence in new regions by using a suite of world-class tech stacks,” said Oduwole. “From a geographical standpoint, this is a critical step in achieving our aim of “making international payments simple, rapid, and affordable.” Our purpose-built technology infrastructure and payment rails enable firms to make rapid cross-border payments in a way that is quite exciting.”
Low visibility and traceability, slow speeds, and high costs of cross-border payments, according to Monica Brand Engel, co-founder and managing partner at Quona Capital, are all barriers to SME growth in global and emerging markets.
Businesses can send cross-border B2B payments at FX rates up to nine times cheaper than they could through traditional banks using Verto’s three main products: payments, exchange, and multi-currency accounts. Businesses can also hold money in 39 currencies and make instant cross-border payments to other companies on the Verto network in real-time.
On a yearly basis, it assists more than 2,000 customers, ranging from startups to SMEs to huge corporations, in facilitating billions of dollars in transactions.
Read more on Tech Gist Africa:
PawaPay, an African payments company, has raised $9 million in seed funding.
SoftBank leads a $400 million funding round for Africa-focused payment firm OPay
