Cape Town-based Cactus Capital, the investment arm of Cactus Advisors, has invested in African fintech startups Flutterwave and e-Factor.
The investments made by Cactus Capital in Nigeria’s Flutterwave and South Africa’s E-Factor follow its investment in Uganda-based mobile payment aggregator Intel World International early last year.
Cactus Advisors’ founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Zach George said the company was excited to be investing in pioneering fintech companies that had graduated from leading accelerator programs worldwide.
Flutterwave provides end-to-end payments technology and infrastructure which enables payment service providers, global merchants, licensed money transfer operators and pan-African banks to process payments to and from Africa with one API integration. It is a graduate of the Y-Combinator accelerator in Silicon Valley.
E-Factor, meanwhile, is a South Africa-based fintech company that has created a digital factoring platform where companies can sell their receivable invoices through an auction to investors with the highest bid. It is a graduate of the Barclays Tech Lab Africa Accelerator.
“As Cactus Advisors, simply investing into high growth, high impact tech-enabled ventures on the continent is not good enough, unless we critically have the right enabling environment on the continent for tech startups to access markets, channel partners and customers,” said George.
“Corporate Africa with its powerful consortium of financial services firms, retailers, telecommunication firms, insurance companies and media houses – all of whom are yet to seriously tap into the innovation pipeline that tech startups offer – provides the ideal platform for commercializing proof-of-concept agreements with startups that serves as a perfect risk mitigation shield to investors looking for returns in the African venture capital sector.”
Previously head of Africa operations of U-Start, a global investment advisory firm for prominent venture capital and private family offices, George founded Cactus Advisors to pioneer corporate venture capital driven accelerator programmes in Africa. The company has so far run the Barclays Tech Lab Africa accelerator, and has also been asked to take charge of Startupbootcamp in Africa.
