Founded in 2013, Yoco built a go-to offline card-payments business for South African merchants using portable card machines and has expanded into online payments. The company serves roughly 150,000 merchants and adds over 500 merchants per day, processing more than $1 billion in card payments annually and over $2 billion since inception. Yoco is transitioning from pure payment acceptance toward a broader financial ecosystem, planning product additions such as mobile money, QR payments and electronic funds transfers. It aims to deepen market presence in South Africa and to replicate growth across Africa and the Middle East, targeting at least one million merchants within four years. To support this, Yoco plans to hire about 200 people across its Cape Town and Amsterdam offices and is investing in product and platform capabilities. Yoco builds tools and services that allow small businesses to accept card payments and manage day-to-day activities, beginning with a smartphone- or tablet-connected card reader launched in late 2015. Its payments offering has expanded to include point-of-sale software, business intelligence, accounting integrations and working-capital financing. The company has grown its merchant base to over 27,000 South African small businesses. Yoco intends to use new funding to grow its network of small business merchants, invest in product development and operational scalability, and hire fintech talent. The business is positioned to deepen its product suite and scale operations with the additional capital. The company is headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa. Yoco is a South African payments provider whose platform enables SMEs to accept card payments and digitize payments and payments data. Seventy percent of the merchants it currently services had never accepted card payments before Yoco enabled them to do so. The company has previously raised seed capital from backers including CRE Venture Capital and angel investors Robby Hilkowitz and Greg Kidd. It has just concluded a Series A funding round led by US-based Quona Capital and Netherlands-based Velocity Capital; the amount was undisclosed. This Series A is the first time Yoco has raised solely from institutional investors. Yoco says the new capital will be used to expand nationally, broaden its product offering and lay the groundwork for international expansion in 2018.

Total raised

$99M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

Jul 2021