NjiaPay secures $2.1 million to address payment fragmentation across African markets

The Amsterdam-based startup coordinates multiple payment providers through a single integration, aiming to reduce transaction failures that often go undetected by merchants

Jonatan Allback, CEO of NjiaPay. (Supplied by NijaPay).

NjiaPay, a payment orchestration company founded in late 2024, has raised $2.1 million in seed funding to expand its engineering and sales teams and develop artificial intelligence tools for payment analysis. The round was led by Newion, a European investor focused on B2B software.

Payment orchestration refers to software that sits above a company's existing payment infrastructure and manages how multiple providers work together. Rather than replacing payment service providers, NjiaPay routes each transaction in real time to the provider most likely to process it successfully, while consolidating performance data into a single dashboard.

The company was built out of a problem its founders encountered firsthand. NjiaPay was spun out of Talk360, an international calling app operating across African markets, after co-founders Jonatan Allback and Roderick Simons spent years managing multiple payment providers and concluded the challenge extended well beyond their own business.

The scale of the problem they identified is significant. Across NjiaPay's merchant base, businesses using a single payment provider see between 20% and 30% of transactions fail, considerably below the global benchmark of around 85% success for card-not-present payments, a category that includes most online transactions. For subscription businesses, the issue is compounded: roughly one in five recurring payments fails because customers do not update card details after a card expires or is replaced.

According to Allback, many merchants are unaware of how many transactions they are losing. "It just bounces and that's it," he said.

Talk360 was NjiaPay's first client. After adopting the platform, the company consolidated six separate payment provider integrations into one and reported a 25% increase in checkout conversion in key markets. "Instead of managing multiple providers and performance issues, we can concentrate on our customers and market expansion," said Hans Osnabrugge, CEO of Talk360.

Since then, NjiaPay has added global gym franchise Anytime Fitness and Melon Mobile, a South African virtual mobile network operator, to its client base. The company currently employs 20 people and operates from its Amsterdam headquarters, with offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg.

The fresh capital will fund engineering hires, payments specialists, and platform development. It will also support the build-out of AI tools that analyse merchant payment data to identify where transactions fail and surface opportunities to improve performance. The company is also exploring AI agents that allow merchants to query their payment data conversationally, asking, for example, what their sales were the previous week or what their most common payment failure was during a given period.

Any AI feature will be tested in a controlled environment before deployment. "We are encouraging everybody in the company to think of creative solutions, learn how AI can help," said Allback, adding that the goal is to automate repetitive tasks while keeping people central to client relationships. "We need people. People buy from people."

NjiaPay also plans to introduce Card Account Updater technology to South Africa, a tool widely used internationally for over a decade that automatically refreshes saved card details when a customer's card is replaced, reducing a category of payment failures that is currently not well addressed in the local market.

"In just one year, we have demonstrated that payment orchestration is becoming essential for businesses operating in Africa," said Allback.