Cellulant押注一个管道就能在35个非洲市场收款；2023年仍屹立不倒

做的是什么生意

Pan-African payments gateway: businesses integrate once to collect and pay out across dozens of African countries through mobile money, bank and card channels, plus SME-facing products like Tingg.

启动资金：$47.5M Series C led by TPG Growth's Rise Fund, closed in 2018, then the largest round ever raised by an African fintech.

起因

Ken Njoroge and Bolaji Akinboro founded Cellulant in Nairobi in 2004 selling music and ringtones billed through phone airtime; when airtime billing kept failing, they approached banks for direct-debit access and found a bigger problem than their own collections.

经过

Cellulant built bank-channel services, onboarded over 60 banks, then attracted airlines that wanted one integration to collect fares across Africa. By 2017 it processed $2.7B in payments; in 2018 it raised $47.5M from TPG Growth's Rise Fund, then the largest African fintech round, to scale its person-to-business and B2B platform across 33 countries, counting Barclays, Standard Chartered and Ecobank among clients. By October 2023 the company spanned 35 countries and 250+ payment methods for more than 2,000 large businesses, and had cut 20% of its workforce to shift toward a product-led structure.

结果

Still operating as a private company in October 2023, with a smaller profile than the payment startups that followed it but a wider footprint, after layoffs and a product-led restructure.

可借鉴之处

业务在于支付碎片化的痛点，而非技术：跟随自己遇到的失败，建立一次集成解决跨境混乱的产品。