Participated · Seed · May 2024

Orca Fraud builds an adaptive fraud-detection platform that plugs directly into payment rails such as mobile wallets, cards, stablecoins and bank transfers. Trained on messy, real-world emerging-market data, its machine-learning models make instant decisions during the transaction flow, protecting against complex attacks without slowing legitimate payments. The system is designed for informal economies where traditional KYC is patchy, allowing it to outperform legacy vendors like Feedzai and NICE Actimize and regional peers such as Curacel and Beam. Today, Orca monitors more than $5 billion in payments every month across 70+ countries for banks, fintechs and telcos. Co-founded by Thalia Pillay and Carla Wilby, the company’s architecture continually improves as volumes grow, giving it a compounding data advantage. With fresh capital, Orca plans to deepen integrations with large African banks and telcos, boost infrastructure to handle 10× current volumes, and expand into Latin America and Southeast Asia while tackling new fraud vectors like AI-generated account takeovers.

Participated · Series A · Feb 2023

Workpay offers cloud-based HR, payroll, and benefits solutions tailored to African businesses, serving both single-jurisdiction firms and companies with cross-border employees. Its product set includes payroll, time and attendance tracking, performance management, and modules to layer financial services such as insurance and partner lending/savings. The company has expanded from an initial payroll focus into a fuller HR stack in response to customer needs. Workpay says it serves more than 1,000 customers across 20 African countries and added nearly 500 businesses in the past 16 months. Its revenue grew 1.5x in the first six months of 2024 and the company is on course to double revenue by the end of the year. Leadership includes co-founder and CEO Paul Kimani and co-founder/COO Jackson Kungu. Workpay is a Kenyan, YC-backed full-stack HR and payroll startup founded in 2019. The platform enables employers to pay salaries in local currencies across Africa (and via partners outside the continent), file taxes, process employee benefits, and manage time, attendance, and leave. An employee-facing app lets workers view payslips, request expenses, and apply for leave. Workpay is launching a payroll engine and an API for accounting firms, and is building a marketplace while adding financial services such as investment linkages, medical and asset insurance, and earned-wage access. The company says it has been doubling revenue annually since 2021, serves nearly 700 customers, and handles about $200 million in total payroll value annually. WorkPay is a Kenya-based cloud HR management and payroll solution serving SMBs in Africa. Its platform includes time tracking and salary disbursement tools designed to eliminate ghost workers and reduce inefficiencies tied to cash payments. The company processes payrolls for more than 25,000 employees in Kenya and serves over 300 SMBs on its platform. WorkPay recently raised US$2.1M in seed funding to fuel growth. Management plans to use the investment to scale HR and payroll tools to more SMBs and expand to enterprise clients across East Africa.