Conduit expands cross-border payment service to Africa with $6m round
TLDR
- Conduit, a B2B payments platform, expands into Africa after securing $6 million seed extension from Helios Digital Ventures.
- The platform enables African businesses to make USD payments to bank accounts via ACH or SWIFT, regardless of US entity presence.
- With $17 million seed funding and analytics tools for DeFi investors, Conduit now focuses on solving cross-border payment challenges in Africa.
Conduit, a B2B cross-border payments platform that initially focused on bridging traditional banking with decentralized finance (DeFi), is now expanding its reach into Africa.
This move comes after securing a $6 million seed extension from Helios Digital Ventures, the venture capital arm of Helios Investment Partners. The platform offers businesses in Africa the ability to make payments in US dollars directly to bank accounts via ACH or SWIFT, even if they don't have a US entity.
Backed by $17 million in seed funding from investors like Portage Ventures, Diagram Ventures, and Gradient Ventures, Conduit also developed analytics tools for institutional investors in the DeFi space. Now, with its pivot to traditional banking, the company is leveraging its expertise to solve cross-border payment issues in Africa.
Key Takeaways
Cross-border payments for businesses in emerging markets represent a largely untapped opportunity, even though businesses of all sizes currently rely on banks and legacy fintechs to transact trillions of dollars annually. A report by Airwallex projects that the value of cross-border payments will surge by 60%, reaching $250 trillion by 2027. From 2018 to 2022 alone, the value of these payments grew by $25 trillion, bringing the total to $150 trillion, with business-to-business (B2B) payments accounting for 97% of that volume. Conduit, which launched in Latin America last August, has been addressing similar challenges in the cross-border payments space. Now, with its pivot towards traditional banking, Conduit is leveraging its platform to enhance cross-border payment solutions for businesses in emerging markets, including Africa.
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