Grace Ashiru
Moment, a payments infrastructure company serving enterprise merchants across Africa, has closed a $22 million Series A round to scale its collections and billing platform. AlphaCode Venture Partners led the round, joined by returning backers General Catalyst and MultiChoice, plus a first-time check from French media group Canal+.
The raise pushes Moment’s total funding to $55 million since launching three years ago. Headquartered in Cape Town with additional offices in Dubai, Johannesburg, Lagos, Kigali and London, the company builds payment acceptance and recurring billing infrastructure for large corporates operating across African markets.
The problem Moment is solving is fragmentation. In South Africa, more than two-thirds of consumer transactions still happen in person at retail points despite widespread bank account ownership. Nigeria runs largely on instant bank transfers alongside cash, cards and digital wallets. In markets with lower banking penetration, mobile money has stepped in to fill the gap. Nowhere does one provider give merchants unified access across all these channels, which is the gap Moment is targeting.
Its platform aggregates locally preferred payment methods, cards, mobile money, real-time bank transfers, e-wallets, recurring bank debits and in-person payments, behind a single API paired with low- and no-code tools. CEO Joel Yarbrough says the platform now handles 600,000 transactions daily and reaches 10 million people a month through clients spanning insurers, subscription platforms and other billers, alongside an in-person acceptance network covering more than two million physical locations.
“Within three years of launch, we are processing for some of Africa’s leading brands,” Yarbrough said, adding that the company has built a platform tailored to the specific challenges of the African market that helps businesses get paid faster and more cheaply.
Dominique Collett, general partner at lead investor AlphaCode Venture Partners, framed Africa’s payment fragmentation as a hidden tax on commerce that Moment is working to dismantle, describing the company as building a defining piece of the continent’s financial infrastructure.
Canal+’s involvement follows its acquisition of MultiChoice, the South African pay-TV group that was an early Moment backer, meaning the French media giant is deepening a relationship it inherited. Thomas Follin, Canal+’s chief diversification officer, said the company came away genuinely impressed after scrutinising Moment’s technology, noting that Moment has managed to lower costs while improving quality at the same time, and that the two companies see a real opportunity to expand digital financial access across the continent together.
Moment’s product set targets subscription and instalment-based businesses specifically, offering recurring payment logic, customer outreach tools, failed payment recovery across both digital and physical channels, and direct integration into enterprise billing systems, alongside reconciliation and back-office clearing features designed to get merchants paid faster.
Giulio di Giannatale, technical lead at South African insurer Sanlam, said the two companies are already mapping out a roadmap that includes embedded insurance within payment flows and data-driven collection optimisation, calling Moment a genuine innovation partner and saying the new funding gives the company runway to accelerate what they’ve already proven works together.
Moment plans to use the fresh capital to expand its network of local payment methods, invest further in platform resilience, and enter additional African markets. It’s competing against a growing field of payment orchestrators and gateway providers targeting the continent, though its focus on enterprise recurring revenue collection carves out a more specialised niche. The company also counts Entree Capital, the Raba Partnership and Helios Investment Partners among its backers, and its Series A adds to a run of continued venture interest in African fintech infrastructure even as investors elsewhere on the continent grow more selective.
