Moment Closes $22 Million Series A Round
Moment, a pan-African fintech, has announced the close of its $22 million (around R364 million) Series A funding round. AlphaCode Venture Partners led the round, marking a major step in this latest Moment Series A funding milestone for the company. General Catalyst, MultiChoice, and Canal+ also took part, with Canal+ joining as a fresh investor.
Since its founding three years ago, Moment has raised a total of $55 million, more than R900 million, to build what it calls one of the continent’s most advanced payment infrastructure businesses. The company offers a full suite of payment collection and revenue retention tools to corporate and enterprise merchants. Moment plans to use this new funding to deepen its network, improve its platform, and speed up expansion across Africa.
Why Investors Are Backing Moment’s Growth
Dominique Collett, General Partner at AlphaCode Venture Partners, explained why the firm chose to back Moment. She said Africa’s payment complexity has long acted as a hidden tax on commerce, hitting every business trying to grow on the continent and every household trying to take part in the digital economy.
Collett said Moment is dismantling that barrier at a continental scale, staying compliant while offering a product that the market’s largest enterprises have already tested and approved. She added that AlphaCode is backing Joel Yarbrough, Moment’s CEO, and his team as they build a defining piece of Africa’s financial infrastructure.
Africa’s Fragmented Payment Landscape
Africa’s payment systems remain notoriously fragmented, and payment habits vary dramatically from one market to the next. In South Africa, more than two-thirds of payments still happen in person at retail locations, even though most people there have bank accounts. Nigeria tells a different story, where instant bank transfers dominate, though cash, cards, and digital wallets all compete strongly too.
In many other markets, mobile money platforms have thrived thanks to low bank penetration. But these platforms remain scattered across dozens of separate operators, and no single provider has been able to offer merchants unified collections across every channel.
How Moment’s Payments Platform Solves This
Yarbrough said Moment was built specifically to solve this fragmentation problem. Within three years of launch, he said, Moment now processes payments for 10 million people every month across some of Africa’s leading brands.
The platform supports the full range of digital payment methods that people prefer locally, alongside an in-person payment network that spans more than two million physical locations. Yarbrough said the platform stays highly resilient too, processing 600,000 transactions a day despite the power and connectivity problems that commonly disrupt African markets. He added that Moment built its platform to handle the specific challenges of the African market, helping businesses get paid faster and at a lower cost.
Canal+ Sees Strong Opportunity In African Fintech
Thomas Follin, Chief Diversification Officer at Canal+, said his company examined Moment closely after acquiring MultiChoice. He described the team as genuinely impressed, noting that Moment had driven down costs while improving quality at the same time. Follin said Moment delivers world-class technology for enterprise-grade subscription and billing customers operating across Africa, and that Canal+ now sees a strong opportunity to work with Moment to expand digital financial access across the continent.
What Moment Offers Merchants And Billers
Moment gives billers and merchants, including insurers and subscription platforms, an extensive suite of collection tools. These include recurring payments, customer outreach tools, and failed payment recovery across both digital and in-person channels. Merchants can also link Moment directly to their enterprise billing systems.
Customers can pay however works best for them through Moment, using cards, mobile money, real-time bank transfers, eWallets, recurring bank debits, or in-person payments. Beyond its advanced APIs, Moment also offers low- and no-code tools that help merchants get up and running quickly, letting them collect payments and retain customers without needing heavy technical resources.
A Growing Partnership With Sanlam
Giulio di Giannatale, Technical Lead at Sanlam, said what excites Sanlam most about Moment isn’t just what the company does today, but the roadmap the two companies are building together. He pointed to plans for embedded insurance within payment flows, data-driven collection optimisation, and serving the mass market across Africa with flexible, customer-first payment options.
Di Giannatale called Moment a genuine innovation partner and said this funding round gives Moment the runway to accelerate what the companies have already proven works together. He said Sanlam looks forward to deepening that collaboration across the wider Sanlam group.
By optimising subscription and instalment payments, adding new locally preferred collection methods across Africa, and building smarter reconciliation and back-office clearing tools, Moment aims to help merchants collect payments confidently anywhere on the continent, while getting their money faster than before.
