Revio, a South African API payments and collections startup, has raised $1.1 million in seed funding led by SpeedInvest.
The round was 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.
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.
Founded by Ruaan Botha in 2020, Revio is a subscription billing platform that maximises a customer’s lifetime value by digitising end-to-end customer engagement processes. This is achieved by providing businesses with a single platform to manage how customers pay and respond in real time.
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.
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.
“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.”
“Revio’s leadership team has bold ambitions and deep industry experience, which is a powerful combination. They have attracted some of the best talents 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.
