On Friday Stripe announced that it will be acquiring Paystack, a Nigeria based startup which intends to solve the online payment transaction in Nigeria. Paystack was founded in the year 2015 by software developers and long time friends Ezra Olubi and Shola Akinlade.With this, the acquisition comes out to be the biggest from the Sub-saharan region and also Stripe’s biggest acquisition to date.
The acquisition can be tracked down from when Stripe raised $600 million amidst the pandemic to serve its goal of product development and geographic expansion. Paystack fits perfectly with the goals of Stripe and allows the company to enter into the African Payment market. Paystack has over 60,000 customers in Nigeria including people from corporates, small-businesses, Global Brands, Fintech companies , schools, and even online betting companies. With the acquisition, both the company will continue to operate independently.
Stripe’s acquisition indicates the tremendous potential in the African market and clearly bets on the growth of the continent. Paystack has proved its potential to its investors, quite a few times now including during 2016 when it became the first-ever startup from the Nigerian belt to go through Y Combinator. In fact, Stripe and Paystack relations date back to 2018 when Stripe led an $8M round for Paystack. With the goal of advancing into the Payment transaction domains, both companies coincide with their ideologies and future plans.
Future Looks Good
Stripe’s significant focus on entering into markets it has not yet entered into and Paystack’s focus on strengthening the payment ecosystem of Africa makes it a partnership to make payment systems accessible to even the most remote nations. This clearly gives a strong message that potential and talented people from the belt are identifying prevailing problems and using technology to the optimum to solve them. With a good amount of resources and Stripe’s Global point of view, Paystack has ample scope to move ahead with its expansion to various African countries and also to build strong technological infrastructure for its company. This will benefit both the company’s interest and in return uplift the whole African startup and online transaction ecosystem.