enza Raises US$6.75M Seed Round to Expand Payments Reach Across Africa
Algebra Ventures and Quona Capital co-led the Abu Dhabi company's first external raise, which will fund expansion in key African markets.
enza, a payments company based in Abu Dhabi, has raised US$6.75 million in seed funding. Algebra Ventures and Quona Capital co-led the round. It is the first time enza has taken outside capital.
The company builds payment tools for banks and fintechs working across Africa. The stack covers cards, wallets and real-time payments, and enza adapts each deployment to local market conditions rather than running a single product everywhere.
The new money goes toward expansion in key African markets, closer work with partner institutions and a faster turnaround on client requests.
Clients in several African countries already use the platform for real-time payments, mobile money, buy-now-pay-later products and connections into domestic and international payment schemes.
enza says its tools cut the cost of digital payments, and that cheaper processing lets clients serve more customers at a profit. Platform data, the company adds, gives those clients something to sell against: a basis for offering additional financial services.
enza estimates Africa has more than 60 million underserved small and medium-sized businesses. Its pitch to banks and fintechs is that the platform can help them reach those customers.
Both investors pointed to the founders' record in global and African payments. Johan Bosini, a partner at Quona Capital, said the firm is backing the team to widen access to digital payments. Tarek Assaad, managing partner at Algebra Ventures, said enza's leadership has a track record of starting, growing and exiting fintech businesses across Africa.
Hany Fekry, enza's chief executive, said he was glad to partner with the two firms, which he said share the company's vision of transforming African financial services through payments digitisation.
The bet rests on a familiar constraint. Where the cost of moving money stays high, small SME accounts are hard to run profitably, and the services that might follow them — savings, credit, instalments — rarely get built. Cutting the cost of a transaction is the precondition for the rest of the product roadmap enza describes.
