Three payments companies have closed significant rounds in rapid succession, collectively pulling in more than $120 million and signalling sustained investor appetite for infrastructure that moves money across — and out of — Africa.
Yellow Card: $40 million for stablecoin payments
Yellow Card, the pan-African stablecoin-based payments startup, has raised $40 million to extend its reach beyond the continent into global payment corridors, according to Serrari Group. The Lagos- and Charlotte-headquartered company operates across more than 20 African markets, where it lets businesses and individuals send, receive, and hold value via stablecoins — primarily USDT and USDC — as a hedge against local currency volatility. The fresh capital is earmarked for product expansion and deepening liquidity in new corridors outside Africa, positioning Yellow Card as a cross-border rails provider rather than a purely Africa-inward platform. The company has previously raised from investors including Polychain Capital and Valar Ventures, and this latest round underscores the growing institutional conviction that stablecoin-denominated settlement is a structurally sound answer to Africa's foreign-exchange and banking-access constraints.
Moment: $22 million Series A with Canal+ on the cap table
Cape Town-based Moment has closed a $22 million Series A, with French media-and-telecoms giant Canal+ joining the cap table alongside other investors, per Tech In Africa. Moment builds payments infrastructure targeted at South African merchants and enterprises, and the involvement of Canal+ — which has aggressively expanded its African subscriber base and needs local payment acceptance at scale — hints at a strategic dimension beyond pure financial return. South Africa remains one of the continent's most sophisticated but also most fragmented payments markets, where legacy bank-led rails coexist uneasily with newer fintech stacks. The $22 million gives Moment runway to deepen merchant integrations and potentially follow Canal+'s footprint into other sub-Saharan markets where the French group operates.
Nala: $60 million targeting Africa's travel payments gap
Nala, the Tanzanian-founded remittance and payments company, has now raised a cumulative $60 million as it sets its sights on Africa's chronically underserved travel payments segment, according to TechCabal. The startup, led by Benjamin Fernandes, originally built its name on low-cost mobile-money transfers into Tanzania and Uganda, but has been steadily widening its aperture. Travel payments — covering everything from airline ticket purchases in local currencies to hotel collections and tour-operator disbursements — remain one of the most painful cross-border money-movement problems on the continent, where international card acceptance is patchy and settlement delays are routine. The $60 million total positions Nala to build or acquire the specialised rails needed to serve travel merchants and their customers across multiple African markets simultaneously.
Reading the three deals together
The trio of closes illustrates a maturing payments layer in African fintech. Yellow Card is betting that stablecoin settlement will increasingly substitute for correspondent banking on Africa-to-world flows — a thesis that gains credibility as dollar liquidity tightens in markets like Nigeria and Egypt. Moment's Canal+ backing suggests telcos and media companies are becoming strategic investors in payments, not just distribution partners, as subscription and content businesses discover that collecting money in Africa is as strategic as the content itself. Nala's pivot toward travel payments opens a vertical where average transaction values are materially higher than consumer remittances, which should improve unit economics even if volumes are lower.
For investors, the common thread is infrastructure bets — each company is building rails or settlement capacity that other businesses can sit on top of, rather than going direct-to-consumer at scale. For operators on the continent, the collective $122 million in fresh capital means more competitive pressure on pricing and more viable alternatives to legacy bank-led FX and payments desks.
Why it matters: More than $120 million flowing into payments infrastructure in a single news cycle is a strong counter-signal to the narrative that African fintech funding has stalled — and the presence of a strategic like Canal+ suggests corporates, not just VCs, are now writing cheques to own a piece of Africa's payment stack.