Klasha Is Building Cross Border Commerce Solutions For African Consumers

Klasha is a fintech company that specializes in building unique software to power African commerce. Klasha is based in Lagos, Nigeria, and San Francisco, USA. The company is backed by Techstars. It is a solution for global merchants looking to serve the increasing African digital native consumers.

Jessica Anuna, the Founder and CEO of Klasha, believes that by 2025, half of the world’s population will live in Africa. So Klasha was built as a technology that enables frictionless cross-border payments and allows international businesses to scale seamlessly into Africa through their application programming interface. Also, they are giving African consumers the same access to the global e-commerce economy experienced on other continents.

The San Francisco and Nigerian-based cross-border technology company, raised $2.4 million in seed funding in October 2021 to build technology infrastructure for cross-border commerce in Africa. The investment round was led by Greycroft with participation from Seedcamp, Berrywood Capital, AVG Basecamp Fund, Practical VC, Plug and Play, First Fund, Expert Dojo, 2.12 Angels, MiLA Capital, and angels, including Joe Cross, Ex-Marketing Head at Wise (formerly TransferWise), Santosh Ankola, Ex-Head of Product at Tech Crunch and Michael Pennington, Co-founder of Gumtree.

The investment will enable Klasha to expand its technology to help international B2Bs and B2Csbusinesses such as ASOS, Zara, Amazon, or Zoom to seamlessly receive payments online in African currencies from consumers across Africa.

Its core technology also allows African consumers to pay international online and offline retailers in African currencies while the retailers receive payouts in their dominant currencies, including USD, GBP, EUR. Klasha is currently available in Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya and aims to invest in driving more revenue, growing its current 10,000 customer base, and expanding into new markets with three more African countries set to go live by the fourth quarter of 2022.

In the past few months, Klasha has continued to power international businesses with the tools they need to grow and expand into Africa. Within five short months of launching, Klasha has already processed more than 20,000 transactions across Africa with an average 366% month-over-month growth rate. It has also built plugin integrations for WooCommerce, OpenCart, and BigCommerce. Its integration library is growing faster to include even more platforms, including Wix, Ecwid, Magneto, and Commerce Cloud. And with its official partnership with BigCommerce, the Klasha Checkout (a product of klasha technology) will reach thousands of e-commerce stores all over the world, enabling them to receive payments online from Africa.

Africa presents vast opportunities for scaling quickly in commerce due to its more than 400 million internet users and the total value of e-commerce which is expected to reach $29 billion by 2022. Even with these figures, the ability to pay online with African money methods including cards, M-Pesa, bank transfers, and mobile money is grossly challenging for consumers on the ground. Klasha believes that with their products, consumers in Africa now have access to technology to facilitate frictionless access to the goods they want regardless of their geographic location.

2. Klasha Payment Links: This is a no-code option to accept payments for B2B and B2C merchants or independent sellers that do not have any e-commerce storefront. The Klasha Payment Link provides a flexible and easy way for international businesses to collect payments from customers in Africa without needing a website, app, or any coding skills. With just a few clicks, businesses can create a simple custom checkout page directly from their KlashaDash dashboard and share it with their customers via email, WhatsApp, or other social media platforms to receive payments.

3. Klasha Mobile App: This is a secure app that allows you to make local and international payments online in your local African currencies without any restrictions. The Klasha mobile app allows you to send and receive money from family and friends in Nigeria, Ghana, or Kenya who use the app with no monthly charges. You can also create a virtual card, fund it with Nigerian Naira, Kenyan Shilling, or Ghana Cedis, and see all your transactions, including the amount paid, merchant details, card information, and much more.

4. KlashaWire: This is a fast and easy way for businesses to pay their suppliers overseas in their preferred African currency, whether Naira, Cedis or other currencies. The suppliers, on the other end, receive the money in the dominant currency of their choice. With this feature, small business owners can make large payments to suppliers overseas with ease while lowering the cost of the transaction directly on the Klasha dashboard. When payments are made, the supplier generally receives it in their dominant currency in two business days. 

Oloyede Oladimeji, CTO of Klasha, said:

“We have built a secure and reliable commerce solution from scratch using modern technologies. As a business, it is important that we not only build but move fast. Every day, we are scaling our solution to solving a unique problem, connecting Africa to global merchants. Africa is a growing economy with huge potential but low card payment penetration, and we are enabling consumers in Africa to access products irrespective of their payment methods. Our multi-currency technology saves merchants the stress of dealing with all the different currencies available in Africa, allowing them to receive payouts in their dominant currency. What is amazing is not what we have built already but what we are going to build.” 

Klasha says it remains committed to simplifying cross-border payments for commerce in Africa and empowering businesses with the tools they need to grow and expand into a market full of energized consumers.