South Africa’s Revio, a payment orchestration platform that helps merchants optimise their order to cash lifecycle, is making waves in addressing payment failures across Africa, and is planning major expansion after banking US$5.2 million seed funding.
Revio is a Africa-focused payment orchestration platform that minimizes the complexity, cost, and risk of payment operations, to help merchants reach and retain more customers. Through a single PCI-compliant platform and API, global and local merchants can access 70+ payment methods, set up configurable routing and retry rules, and dynamically engage customers throughout the payment journey.
This includes features such as smart transaction routing to increase success rates, automated dunning and customer engagement workflows, and the ability to offer partial payments or payment plans.
Founded in 2020 and launched in 2021, the startup recently announced a seed investment round of US$5.2 million to help it expand across Africa and expand its capabilities, with this following up on a US$1.1 million round secured late last year.
Co-founder and CEO Ruaan Botha was inspired to start the company by seeing how much time and manual effort businesses spend on their payment operations, including managing failed payments. When asking more than 30 clients where they would invest US$1 if they had to fix their payment systems, they all unhesitatingly confirmed they would spend at least 90c on better managing payment failures and customer churn.
“Through a single API, Revio brings transparency to merchants’ payment stacks and optimises revenue operations with data-driven recovery workflows. The team aggregates and enhances digital payment methods through intelligent orchestration, including configurable transaction routing, automated failover, and smart retries. This unique platform positioning enables Revio to collaborate rather than compete with payment gateways, and provide access to previously untapped customer segments,” Botha told Disrupt Africa.
Revio is now active across more than 25 African markets, and 70 payment methods. The company now counts four of Africa’s largest insurers and two largest telcos as clients, and has secured a strategic partnership with a tier one African bank to offer distribution to its base of enterprise and mid-size clients. Clients include Old Mutual, Standard Bank, MTN aYo, and Innovation Group.
“South Africa is our primary market, where the majority of our clients are currently based. We have been fortunate to scale with some of our multinational clients to serve them in new markets, including Nigeria, Zambia, Namibia, Botswana, and Ivory Coast. We know that payment failures are a significant pain point in markets such as Nigeria and Ghana, and are excited to expand our offering to these geographies,” said Botha.
Revio’s business model combines multiple revenue streams aligned to value creation for clients – getting paid and recovering revenue.
“Clients pay a platform fee and transactional fees, linked to the success rate we help them achieve. Net revenue has grown 1,000 per cent year-on-year, with healthy unit economics and growth in average contract value,” said Botha.
“Payment orchestration is relatively nascent as a concept, especially in emerging markets. We’ve had to iterate our market positioning and sales messaging to make sure we can effectively connect with prospective clients. We still have some work to do here, but our current clients’ trust, combined with this capital injection, should help us to invest in the right level of market education and accelerate our growth.”
