NjiaPay, a South Africa-based spin-out startup, is rapidly gaining traction by simplifying how businesses across Africa manage the complexity of their digital transactions. The startup, which emerged from the communications app Talk360 in December 2024, operates a unique payments management platform. According to CEO Jonatan Allback, NjiaPay’s core value lies in owning the complexity for the client, providing a single solution that sits above traditional Payment Service Providers (PSPs).
Funding, Model, and Traction
NjiaPay closed an oversubscribed US$1.3 million pre-seed funding round in January 2025, led by HAVAIC, with participation from Renew Capital and various African and European angel investors. This capital fueled the company’s early-year focus on team building and platform enhancement.
-
Unique Model: Unlike most South African companies that aim to be in the money flow as a PSP, NjiaPay acts as an orchestrator. It aggregates multiple PSPs to help optimize transaction success rates and conversion for clients through smart routing and redundancy checks.
-
Operational Benefits: For clients, NjiaPay provides a streamlined experience, offering one reconciliation file, one unified merchant portal for all data analytics, and a single unified checkout experience, regardless of how many payment providers they use. This is particularly valuable for businesses that need to maintain PCI compliance.
-
Market Presence: The platform is currently live in South Africa (core market, 80% of clients), Nigeria, and Kenya. Expansion plans are merchant-driven, with clients currently pushing NjiaPay into new markets like Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Cameroon.
-
Monetization: The business model is simple, structured on a monthly fee determined by the client’s chosen tier, which depends on the volume of transactions processed and the features leveraged.
Allback noted that initial uptake has exceeded expectations, attracting interest from both startups needing redundancy and large enterprise clients looking to improve their payment offering without building internal capabilities. The primary operational challenge faced so far has been the time-intensive integration process with new PSPs, which often takes weeks instead of the estimated days due to documentation and testing discrepancies.
