Egypt and U.S.-based MoneyHash has raised $3 million in pre-seed funds to integrate payment systems. The company, which describes itself as the Middle East and Africa’s “first super-API for payment orchestration and revenue operations,” just emerged from beta to clinch the deal.
MoneyHash was founded in 2020 by Nader Abdelrazik, Mustafa Eid and Anisha Sekar to take on the gap created by unintegrated payment systems in industries, especially e-commerce.
The startup had previously in June, raised an undisclosed six-figure backed by investors such as Kepple Africa Ventures, LoftyInc Capital and lead COTU Ventures. The Middle Eastern early-stage fund also led this extension, with participation from previous backers in the initial pre-seed round and others like VentureSouq, VentureFriends, The Continent Venture Partners and First Check Africa. Angel investors include NerdWallet’s Tim Chen, Jake Gibson and Belvo’s Oriol Tintore.
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MoneyHash said in a statement that it will use the funds to turbocharge its growth in the Middle East and Africa. The company’s plan includes expanding its team, currently 15 across the U.S., Egypt, the UAE, Nigeria and some parts of Europe, and hiring mid-level and senior software engineers.
The goal is to leverage its relationship with companies in providing a simpler payment method that will compress the multiple payment channels into one. Per TechCrunch, MoneyHash sits on top of payment providers and offers its infrastructure as an extension of companies’ product backend. This extension becomes their connection to the entire payment ecosystem in the markets they operate.
“The idea of the super-API is that you consolidate the different payment accounts and build all of these features on top of it. MoneyHash becomes this one-stop-shop product, or payments stack that you put in your product and manage all of these different integrations and checkout experience in each of the African and Middle Eastern countries and have all your information on one dashboard,” CEO Abdelrazik said on a call with TechCrunch.
While MoneyHash was founded in late 2020, the startup started operation in early 2021, in Egypt, when it began allowing 17 companies to use its sandbox environment to connect with its API and access payments gateways such as Fawry, Paymob and PayTabs.
Abdelrazik told TechCrunch that MoneyHash will plug into different payment gateways and processors active in the Middle East and North Africa post-beta. Some include Checkout, Stripe, Ayden, Amazon Pay, Tap and ValU. He said integration with payment providers in sub-Saharan Africa (mainly serving Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa) like Yoco, Paystack and Flutterwave will follow suit.
MoneyHash clients cut across different industries: e-commerce, travel and tourism, and remittances, among others. They can integrate payment providers with a few clicks, embed a unified checkout system, and access micro-services such as transaction routing, subscription management and invoicing on the platform.
Already the startup has five paying customers from the 17 companies testing its sandbox for free. MoneyHash generates revenue by charging companies between $150 and $1,000 per month, depending on the number of payment providers they connect to. The platform also takes transaction fees that start at 10 cents and go down as payments volume increases.
Abdelrazik said MoneyHash plans to become the AWS of payments in the Middle East and Africa. “What AWS did to the cloud, where it made it easy for companies to build as many services on top of the infrastructure, we think the payment industry, especially in emerging markets, is very fragmented and needs an AWS for money, which MoneyHash is doing when you connect with it and build as much as you need without needing to change anything,” he said.