Jonaton Allback, CEO of NjiaPay. (Supplied by NijaPay)
Fintech payment solutions provider NjiaPay has secured $2.1 million – R35.25 million at this morning’s exchange rate of R16.78 – in seed funding to expand its engineering and sales teams and develop new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered payment tools.
The one-year-old entity, which manages online payment tools, will be developing solutions that analyse client payment data and identify problems or opportunities, as well as expand sales and engineering staff, explains CEO Jonatan Allback.
As Africa’s digital economy grows, online businesses are being forced to use multiple payment service providers (PSPs) to protect transaction success rates, offer local payment options and avoid outages, NjiaPay explains in a release.
However, juggling several providers creates operational complexity, makes reporting harder and exposes businesses to the kind of performance volatility that directly affects revenue, the company adds.
The Baymard Institute, an e-commerce research company, puts the average abandonment rate at 70.19%. Across NjiaPay’s merchant base, businesses using a single provider see between 20% and 30% of transactions fail, well behind the global card-not-present benchmark of around 85% success.
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Many merchants are unaware of the scale of the problem because their payment providers don’t flag it. “It just bounces and that’s it,” says Allback.
For subscription businesses, the challenge is compounded, says Allback. Around one in five recurring transactions fail because cards expire or are replaced and customers don’t update their details, resulting in lost revenue and lost customers.
NjiaPay sits on top of a company’s existing payment providers and manages how they work together. Through a single integration, it routes transactions in real-time to the provider most likely to process them successfully and consolidates all payment performance data into one view. Rather than replacing PSPs, NjiaPay coordinates them.
The company was founded in late 2024 by Allback and Roderick Simons. It was spun out of Talk360, an international calling app serving Africa, after the team spent years managing multiple payment providers across African markets and realised the problem was bigger than them.
NjiaPay has a staff complement of 20 people and is headquartered in Amsterdam, with offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Talk360 was NjiaPay’s first client. After implementing the platform, it reduced six PSP integrations to one and achieved a 25% increase in checkout conversion in key markets.
“By tackling the complexity of the African payment ecosystem, NjiaPay has freed Talk360 to focus on growth,” says Hans Osnabrugge, CEO of Talk360. “Instead of managing multiple providers and performance issues, we can concentrate on our customers and market expansion.”
NjiaPay has since added global 24/7 gym franchise Anytime Fitness and Melon Mobile, one of South Africa’s newer virtual mobile network operators, to its client base.
European B2B software-as-a-service investor Newion led the seed round. The capital will go toward hiring experienced engineers and payments specialists and building out the platform.
“In just one year, we have demonstrated that payment orchestration is becoming essential for businesses operating in Africa,” says Allback.
Mathijs de Wit, managing partner at Newion, says payments across Africa remain fragmented and complex despite rapid fintech innovation. “NjiaPay addresses this with a robust, enterprise-grade orchestration layer that unifies providers, increases reliability and optimises transaction performance,” he says.
NjiaPay is building AI into several parts of the business, from product development to internal operations. On the product side, the company is developing tools that analyse merchant payment data to surface where transactions fail and identify opportunities to improve performance.
It is also exploring AI agents that let merchants query their payment data directly. “One product that we are entertaining building is around an agent that you can just ask: what was my sale last week? What was the biggest payment problem? Send me a report that I can send on to my CFO,” says Allback.
Internally, AI is being used to support sales and customer engagement, identifying companies with similar payment challenges and generating targeted outreach. “I guess the beauty of being a start-up is that we can really adopt and adapt on the AI side,” says Allback.
Any AI development will be tested in a sandbox first. “We are encouraging everybody in the company to think of creative solutions, learn how AI can help,” he says. The goal is to automate repetitive processes, while keeping people at the centre of customer relationships. “We need people, right? People buy from people.”
NjiaPay is also planning to introduce Card Account Updater to South Africa, a tool widely used internationally for more than a decade that automatically updates saved card details when a customer’s card changes, reducing avoidable payment failures. It is not yet widely used locally.
