Nigerian startup ZirooPay secures $11.4M in a series A round
ZirooPay, based in Lagos and Helsinki, has raised $11.4 million in a Series A round led by Zrosk Investment Management, a Lagos-based venture capital firm.
Investors that have already invested With involvement from other private and institutional funds such as Fedha Capital and Exotix Advisory, Inventure and other private and institutional funds such as Fedha Capital and Exotix Advisory returned.
Petri Kivinen, a former managing director at Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and Renaissance Capital; Abiodun Ajai, a director at Bank of America’s Sub-Saharan Africa division; and Jonas Dromberg, a former Bloomberg bureau head, were among the individual investors.
This additional capital will be used to improve the company’s payment infrastructure, accelerate its expansion, and hire more people.
The funds raised ($600,000 in seed) would be used to launch the company in Nigeria, according to CEO Omoniyi Olawale, who was based solely in Helsinki at the time.However, the firm did not complete its launch in Lagos until five years later.His company, which secured an additional €2 million, was fine-tuning its technology and adding more features, which caused the delay.That pitch hasn’t changed, and ZirooPay has grown tremendously in its three years of
According to the company, over 15,000 merchants use their POS terminals and mobile app. These merchants processed $500 million in transactions over the course of three years, a 5,000 percent increase.
ZirooPay will use the growth investment to expand its product suite and add more payment channels and options in order to build up an omnichannel system for retailers.
ZirooPay sees a potential to dominate an open retail industry as POS suppliers in Nigeria, particularly fintechs, increasingly focus on agency banking—a significant fintech segment that encourages financial inclusion.
