Nigerian Tech Entreprenuer Favour Ori’s Payday Raises $3m Led By Moniepoint Inc

Payday, a neobank issuing global (USD, EUR and GBP) accounts to Africans, has raised $3 million to fuel its “future of work” initiative through borderless payment alternatives in major currencies.

The seed round was led by Moniepoint Inc (formerly TeamApt Inc), the U.S. entity that houses Moniepoint Microfinance Bank and TeamApt Nigeria. Techstars, Angels Touch, HoaQ, DFS Lab’s Stellar Africa Fund, Ingressive Capital Fund II and angel investors such as MFS Africa chief Dare Okoudjou and Norebase CEO Tola Onayemi also participated.

When Favour Ori launched Payday in June 2021, the initial play was to build PayPal for Africa, for which it secured a million dollars in pre-seed funding.

Customers in 11 African countries, including Rwanda, where it first established its headquarters due to its business-friendly environment, had access to the platform and could send money to each other.

Subsequently, the fintech, which became the first Rwandan company to join Techstars (Toronto program) and soon raised a $1.2 million pre-seed extension, learned that enabling cross-border payments was expensive despite. As such, it shut down nine corridors and focused on Nigeria, where it has since witnessed tremendous transaction volume and user growth.

With Payday, African remote workers and freelancers, particularly in Nigeria and Rwanda, can send and receive money in USD, GBP, EUR and 20 other currencies. This allows them and those in the diaspora who work remotely for international organizations to be paid and withdraw money in their choice of currency.

Payday also offers virtual dollar and naira cards (which allow Nigerian users to purchase goods and services on foreign platforms), currency swaps, payment links, local bill payments and peer-to-peer transfers.

“We were the first startup to start issuing virtual accounts in Africa around June 2021, and we’ve done this for over 20 months, so we know what works and understand our market and users.”
Payday ramped up its social media marketing push over the last few months to increase market share, which seems to be paying off. The fintech ended 2022 with slightly over 100,000 users, and now offers its virtual cards and other products to more than 300,000 users. Payday also processes an average of 40,000 transactions daily and over $25 million monthly, numbers that have fetched the fintech a $15 million acquisition offer by one of the continent’s unicorns, which, Ori says, was turned down.

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