ZirooPay raises $11.4 million in Series A funding for mobile POS solution in Nigeria

ZirooPay, a Lagos and Helsinki-based startup, announced Tuesday it has raised $11.4 million in Series A funding.

Launched in 2014, ZirooPay is a developer of mobile POS payment systems designed to facilitate mobile payments.

The round was led by Lagos-based VC fund Zrosk Investment Management.

Existing investors Nordic venture fund Inventure returned, with participation from other private and institutional funds such as Fedha Capital and Exotix Advisory.

Individual investors like Petri Kivinen, the former managing director at Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Renaissance Capital; Abiodun Ajai, the director, Sub-Saharan Africa of Bank of America; Kurt Bjorklund, managing partner at Permira; Stephane Kurgan, venture partner at Index Ventures; and Jonas Dromberg, former bureau chief at Bloomberg, participated.

The new funding, the startup said, will enable it to expand its payment infrastructure, accelerate growth and grow its team.

According to TechCrunch, Ziroopay CEO, Omoniyi Olawale, said one of the biggest challenges to the mass adoption of card payments at retail locations is the rate of transaction failures as a result of poor internet connection.

He noted that its mobile application allows small businesses across the retail, agency banking, hospitality and services sectors to perform similar tasks, such as tracking sales and managing business operations.

“Think about everything that the cash registers seen in big supermarkets can do; with an Android application and a mobile point-of-sale card reader, we provide that same functionality to small businesses,” he said.

“We’ve been able to see over 70 per cent of our users migrate from paper-based accounting to depend on in-app sales accounting within three months of onboarding.” Mr Olawale was quoted by TechCrunch as saying.

“No major company is coming in with modern technology trying to tackle this space and that’s one area that we see an opportunity for us because we are primarily a retail payment platform. Even though we provide agency banking on the side, our focus is on retail, and that’s something that differentiates us from the other players, ” he said.

Samson Esemuede, the managing director and chief investment officer of Zrosk said “The growth in the online economy of the African continent has been remarkable; however, the offline economy is orders of magnitude larger than the online economy.

“ZirooPay has a patented technology advantage (that works without an internet connection) and distribution model that significantly increases the odds of digitizing the offline economy at a unit cost that makes the story particularly compelling. The payment space has become well-resourced and competitive, but the white space we see in the digitization of cash is the reason we are optimistic about the outlook for this investment.”