South African HR-fintech startup Rafiki Spins Off payments division into standalone company Petl Pay

After two years operating with distributed global teams, Rafiki Works separates its payments infrastructure into an independent fintech product targeting cross-border, project-based workflows

South African startup Rafiki Works, a work and payments operating system designed to simplify subcontracting and cross-border collaboration for agencies, freelancers, and distributed teams, has carved out its financial technology division into a dedicated company called Petl Pay.

Greg Cooke and Nicolas Boswell launched Rafiki in 2023, initially as a freelance marketplace before pivoting toward curated groups of senior fractional talent and eventually building out a full operating system for managing global teams. A core feature of the platform allows agencies and their subcontractors to consolidate multiple payment obligations into a single invoice, enabling instant disbursements to contributors scattered across different countries, a persistent friction point in service-based industries.

The decision to spin off Petl Pay came after two years of running live projects with distributed teams spanning Africa, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and the United States. According to Cooke, the experience consistently exposed the same structural gap: while modern work has become modular and project-driven, the financial infrastructure supporting it was still designed around traditional employment models, payroll cycles, and static organizational structures. Agencies and contractors were left stitching together a patchwork of time-tracking tools, invoicing software, expensive bank transfers, and spreadsheets just to ensure everyone got paid correctly.

Petl Pay is positioned at the intersection of HR technology and fintech, with a focus on what Cooke describes as payments orchestration, turning collaborative workflows into consolidated invoices that can then be split and routed to multiple contributors across borders from a single client payment. The platform integrates both fiat and stablecoin settlement rails to accelerate transactions and improve transparency, without taking custody of funds.

Rafiki Works also differentiates itself from other embedded finance or invoicing platforms by centering on multi-party, collaborative invoicing, offering affordable cross-border transfers and free instant payments between Rafiki wallets worldwide, with stablecoin and fiat payout options built directly into the invoicing flow.

Petl Pay is currently operating in private beta, with an initial focus on payment corridors connecting the US, UK, and EU with Southern Africa, while actively building out partnerships across both Africa and Europe. Rafiki Works will continue operating independently as a services and talent platform.