88mph
4th Floor, Piedmont Plaza, 671 Ngong Road, Nairobi, Kenya
Overview
88mph provides early-stage web/mobile companies with up to $100K in funding through their 3-month startup accelerator program. They are a private seed fund with vibrant work spaces in Nairobi and Cape Town, and a talented network of startup founders, investors, corporate partners, and local business professionals. They add value to startups during the accelerator program by providing advice on products, go-to-market, sales, company structure, hiring, funding options, and scalability, as well as bringing in experienced individuals from around the world to fill in the gaps.
- Total investments
- 1
- Lead investments
- 1
- Investments · 12mo
- 0
- Active investors
- 7
Sector focus
- Financial Services
- Mobile
- Web Browsers
Investment portfolio
- PawaPay
Led · Seed · Aug 2021
PawaPay is a U.K.-based, Africa-focused payments company that collapses telecom operators' mobile-money integrations into a single API for businesses. Its core product lets merchants access mobile-money systems from providers such as AirtelTigo, Econet, MTN, Safaricom, Orange and Vodafone to send and receive payments. The company says it handles over 10 million transactions per week and operates in beta across 10 African countries (Cameroon, DRC, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia). PawaPay spun off last year from online sports betting company betPawa and is led by CEO Nikolai Barnwell. It plans to scale its operational presence, recruit talent, expand into new markets and go live across 30–40 telco integrations. PawaPay emphasizes full regulation and licensing in each market and manages local operations, compliance, regulatory cover and bank accounts to provide a stable product for high-volume mobile-money payments.