South African API fintech startup, Revio secures $1.1 million seed funding

South African API payment and collections company, Revio, has raised $1.1 million in seed funding from leading investors to solve the payment failure problem in emerging markets.

The round was led by SpeedInvest, joined by RaliCap Ventures, The Fund, and Two Culture Capital. Several angel investors also participated, including payment and revenue recovery experts from Sequoia, Quona Capital, and Circle Payments.

In Africa, 2-3 out of every 10 payments fail, compared to the 0.7 global average. Reasons for this include the fragmented payments landscape, higher dispute rates, invalid or expired card details, false-positive fraud checks, multiple or dormant accounts, and insufficient funds.

This high failure rate results in billions of dollars in lost revenue. In Africa alone, an estimated $14 billion in recurring revenue is uncollected each year, and the continent has a 320% higher churn rate than mature markets.

With digital payments growing at 20%+ year-on-year, this problem will only intensify. While gateways and aggregators have made it easier for businesses to accept multiple payment methods, few solutions exist to deal with payment failures. Revio, a South African API fintech startup, working to solve this problem, has today announced $1.1 million in seed funding raised from top-tier investors.

The funding will be used to launch new products, expand the team, and enter new emerging markets, all contributing to Revio's mission of reducing payment failures and churn.

Its Payments Orchestration, Billing Automation, and Revenue Recovery solutions enable businesses to passively, actively, and proactively recover lost transactions, increase revenue, optimise cash flow, and increase customer lifetime value.

The round was led by global FinTech investor SpeedInvest, joined by RaliCap, The Fund, and Two Culture Capital. Several angel investors also participated, including payment and collections experts from Sequoia, Quona Capital and Circle Payments. This is Revio’s first institutional funding round since emerging from stealth in March 2021.

“We’re grateful to be supported by some of the world’s best FinTech investors and operators,” said Revio founder and CEO, Ruaan Botha. “We have ambitions to build a global business that helps businesses reduce failed payments and recover the revenue they’ve earned.

We know that growing a business is hard, but getting paid shouldn’t be. I’m excited to partner with our investor community to accelerate our growth and the value that we deliver to our customers.”

“Revio is building a category-leading product to enable businesses to better manage their cash flow and accelerate growth,” said Hayden Simmons, Partner at RaliCap Ventures. “The African payments landscape is fragmented, and we believe they will play a critical role in contributing to the growth of subscription commerce and companies with pan-African scale.”

In just one year of trading after emerging from stealth in 2021, Revio has landed 50+ customers and processes thousands of transactions each month. The client base is diverse, spanning large-scale enterprises, mid-market corporates, and fast-growing scale-ups across multiple industries.

“Revio’s leadership team has bold ambitions and deep industry experience, which is a powerful combination. They have attracted some of the best talent in the market and are executing at pace. We are excited to be investing at this inflection point in their journey,” said Scott Hartley, Co-founder and Partner at The Fund.

“Having been part of multiple payment orchestration and billing automation platforms across the world, we can see the incredible potential of using this toolset to increase revenue recovery for businesses in a region where three out of ten payments fail. With a team as experienced as Revio's at the helm of tackling this massive opportunity we're convinced that they can fundamentally change the payments landscape for businesses in their target markets and are excited to be backing them on that journey,” said Alvaro Perezcano, FinTech Investor at SpeedInvest.

How does Revio work?

Revio, a South African based API payment and collection company, is trying to plug this problem. The fintech startup makes it easier for businesses across Africa to connect to multiple payment methods and manage payment failures.

Today, businesses can integrate with Revio’s API to seamlessly accept and reconcile 20+ payment methods across 25+ African markets, to increase their payment success rates and automate revenue operations. Based on the insight that ‘there’s more to getting paid than accepting payments,’ Revio offers:

• Smart payment routing and failover to increase payment success rates
• Configurable auto-retries, dunning rules, and proactive card expiry management
• Data-driven interactions to recover lost revenue, including secure payment links, self-service billing changes, and options to settle arrears in cash at a nearby retailer
• Real-time analytics and reporting to optimise recovery processes

Combined with real-time customer segmentation and analysis, these capabilities can help businesses increase their customer lifetime value and direct collections' effort toward the customers with the highest return on investment. Through a single integration, businesses can access all these functionalities, simplifying complexity, accelerating speed to market, and increasing revenue and customer lifetime value.