NjiaPay raises $2.1M seed funding to simplify merchant payments across Africa

South African payments startup NjiaPay has raised $2.1 million in seed funding to expand its platform that helps businesses manage multiple payment providers through a single system.

Newion Partners, a European software-as-a-service investor, led the round. The company announced the funding on Monday, saying it will use the capital to expand engineering and commercial teams, strengthen integrations, and accelerate growth across Africa.

NjiaPay operates as a coordination layer between merchants and their payment service providers. Instead of businesses integrating with five or six different payment systems separately, they connect to NjiaPay once, and the platform routes transactions to whichever provider performs best at that moment.

Why African businesses need payment orchestration

Africa’s payment system is not uniform. A business operating in several countries often needs different payment providers for each one: one for Kenya, another for Nigeria, and a third for South Africa. Each provider has its own success rates, separate integrations, and different reporting systems.

Managing payments by hand causes problems. Payment failures happen often, integration work builds up, and businesses lack a clear view of performance across different providers. This issue hits recurring and subscription businesses hard, as about one in five transactions fails due to expired or replaced cards.

NjiaPay optimizes payment processing by intelligently routing transactions in real-time, selecting the best provider, and consolidating performance data in one dashboard. It works with existing providers to improve transaction success.

Talk360, the international calling app that spun out of NjiaPay in late 2024, faced significant challenges while scaling across Africa. Managing six payment provider integrations became increasingly unsustainable.

After using NjiaPay, Talk360 combined six payment integrations into one. This change led to a 25% increase in checkout conversion in important markets. Talk360 CEO Hans Osnabrugge stated, “NjiaPay has simplified the African payment process, allowing Talk360 to concentrate on growth.”

Bringing European payment tools to Africa

NjiaPay is introducing the Card Account Updater to the South African market. This tool has been widely used in Europe for over a decade, but has not been fully utilized locally. The feature automatically updates saved card details when customers receive replacement cards, helping to reduce avoidable payment failures.

Jonatan Allback and Roderick Simons founded NjiaPay in late 2024 after encountering payment complexity while building Talk360. The company has been operating for about a year and, over the past eight months, has focused on South African businesses.

Current clients include Talk360, Anytime Fitness, and Melon Mobile. The company has about 20 employees based across the Netherlands and South Africa, with headquarters in Amsterdam and offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg.

The $2.1 million will fund expansion as NjiaPay pushes beyond South Africa into other African markets where payment fragmentation creates similar challenges for merchants.

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