Thepeer Raises $2.1 Milion Seed Round

The debate on whether Africa needs more fintech has been ongoing for a while now. Considering that it is now over 600 fintech in Africa. Most fintech offers similar services to their customers. Some of which include payments, neo banking, lending, investing and trading. Apart from that, they also have wallets in common.

Thepeer is not a pure fintech startup. Its application programming interface connects businesses’ wallets. Thus enabling business-to-business transfers for their customers. Thepeer was co-founded by Kosisochukwu Chike Ononye and Michael ‘Trojan’ Okoh in August 2021 to build APIs for easy money transfer. The APIs allow businesses to embed different products into their applications and websites for easy transactions by their customers. For example,  if you have an Eversend wallet and you want to make payments to any business that has integrated Thepeer products, you can send money from one wallet to the other.

Thepeer recently raised a $2.1 million seed round led by the Raba Partnership. While ralicap, Timon Capital, BYLD Ventures, Musha Ventures, Sunu and Uncovered Fund par, Chipper Cash and Stitch participated. This funding comes after it raised $220,000 in pre-seed in 2021. The startup is looking to roll out more functionalities and wallets in other currencies. Since it’s only Naira wallets that are available.

What are Thepeer’s products?

Thepeer flagship product is known as “send”. Send allows customers of businesses who integrate its APIs in their apps or website to send money across both platforms. Again, it partnered with fintech unicorn, Flutterwave to build and launch its two additional B2B2C products: Direct Charge and Checkout. Direct Charge allows customers of about 15 businesses to fund their wallets from each other using Thepeer. As against cards and bank transfers. The check-out product is similar to direct charge. But works only for online food sites and clothing stores. Businesses here who integrate the APIs can get payments from their customers from Bitsika, Eversend, Chipper Cash and Paga wallets.

Who can use Thepeer?

Thepeer was built for the following:

Individuals: Anyone can use the Thepeer to send money from their account in one app to other Apps. For example, if you have an Eversend app and a Nguvu health app on your phone. If you need the services provided by the health app, you can pay them directly from Bitsika or any app that has Thepeer embedded inside.

Businesses: Businesses can integrate Thepeer API which helps them do more for their customers.By helping their customers make flexible transactions across various Apps. Without any transaction fees.

Growth and Traction

Thepeer has seen an average month-on-month transaction growth of 161% from 2021 through to q1–22. The flagship product “sends” monthly transaction volume has grown over 65 times to “eight-figure” million dollars. The platform makes money by charging customers 0.5% (₦25 capped at

₦2,000) for Direct Charge and Checkout transactions. It also charges businesses $0.01 for each customer transaction. Its infrastructure is being used by other platforms such as cross-border wallet, Eversend, and teletherapy platform, Nguvu Health. Thepeer plans to expand to other African countries, including Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt.