Stitch announces $25 million Series A Extension
Stitch, a South African payments infrastructure company recently closed a $25 million Series A Extension, led by Ribbit Capital. Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Cape Town, Stitch enables businesses to manage, orchestrate, reconcile and accept payments, and to disperse funds via its API connectivity and “direct connections” with banks and networks.
Stitch launched the first payments product only two years ago. Stitch is processing over 50 million payments annually, and over $2 billion in value, for some of the largest businesses operating in South Africa, including MTN, Multichoice, The Foschini Group (TFG)’s Bash, HollywoodBets, LottoStar, Luno, Yoco and many more - with a few more exciting clients launching soon.
Over the last two years, Stitch have gone from a single-method (Pay by bank) provider to an end-to-end payments solution provider with eight pay-in methods (and counting), comprehensive payouts capabilities and a robust payments management platform (PayOS), enabling payments orchestration and reconciliation via a single application. PayOS works as well for Stitch methods as it does for other providers and methods.
Multi-method payments. Card-dominant offerings are no longer sufficient. With increasing uptake of various wallets and a growing share of bank payment methods (such as Capitec Pay in South Africa), merchants require providers who can offer multiple methods with equal features across them. Too often, non-card methods are added as an afterthought.
Multi-provider environments. Often, multiple methods across multiple geographies means a merchant needs to have multiple providers - both in each market and across markets. This means providers need to flexibly fit into complex payment environments and integrate directly with merchants or through existing providers or platforms with ease.
Embedded payments as a feature of other platforms. Increasingly, payments are being embedded into a client’s core operating systems - e.g., their commerce platform. For large enterprises, these platforms are highly customised, and they require much more than off-the-shelf plug-ins. The ability to deploy sales engineers and solutions architects to design the right solution that fits with a client’s chosen platform is a critical piece that’s necessary to achieve the payments performance levels they need.
Complex payment flows. Business models are evolving, and as a result, more platform and marketplace models are becoming prevalent in large enterprises. This means providers need to be able to accommodate pay-ins and payouts, manage settlements, orchestrate split payments and be flexible enough to customise these solutions for any combination clients can think of.
Unified commerce. Especially for large enterprises, omnichannel matters. This means digital and physical channels are merging, and orders and payments need to move fluidly across both environments. The ability for online payments providers to interface with offline point-of-sale systems is becoming a key factor in the purchase decision.
