Lagos and San Francisco-based fintech company Klasha has raised $2.4 million in seed funding and aims to improve its services that enable seamless cross-border trade.
Klasha was founded in 2018 by Jessica Anuna and its original focus was to enable Africans to have access to global fashion retailers and be able to purchase goods directly from them. The startup has expanded into providing APIs and various integrations that facilitates cross-border payments in Africa. The business model with which the company operates allows Africans to acquire goods directly from retailers and sellers irrespective of where they are in Africa, and to make payments.
The seed round was led by Greycroft and saw participation from other investors like FirstRound VC, Practical VC, Berrywood Capital, Seedcamp, AVG Basecamp Fund, Expert Dojo, 2.12 Angels, MiLA Capital and Plug and Play. The round also had participation from angel investors. Michael Pennington, the Co-founder of Gumtree, Techcrunch’s former Head of Product – Santosh Ankola, and Joe Cross of Wise were part of the angel investors that participated in the round.
Klasha currently operated in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya and has plans of expanding into more African territories as it continues to grow its revenue and customer base. The company has stated plans to launch into new markets in three African countries by the last quarter of this year.
Klasha operates numerous products that make the fintech company an impressive all-rounder. Klasha operates a checkout solution that can be easily integrated with any e-commerce platform. This product creates an avenue for foreign businesses to receive payments in African currencies such as Naira, Cedis, etc., from their customers in Africa. Klasha is extremely friendly to use because it captures the realities of the African scene and has designed its products to make payments and purchases easy for Africans. The company already has plugins for highly respected companies such as OpenCart, WooCommerce and BigCommerce.
Another impressive product that Klasha provides is its KlashaWire with which consumers can make payments via the multiple payments options provided by Klasha using their local currency. These international businesses in turn receive these payments in dominant currencies such as the dollar or the euro after two business days.
Klasha’s founder, Jessica Anuna.
Klasha also runs a logistic service which is a huge aspect of e-commerce today. According to the company’s founder, “A lot of our merchants have said to us, if we’re going to be able to accept payments from Africa, we need a way to seamlessly ship to Africa in a short amount of time and provide the best end to end logistics experience for our consumers. And that’s what we’ve done”. Providing logistics services have put Klasha in the business frontline and have helped it gain more trust from users. Logistics services that provide cross-border services usually take about 14 days on average to deliver good but Klasha, through partnerships it has with selected logistics companies, ensure that goods are delivered to customers within the next five to nine days.
Klasha also operates a mobile service that allows its users in the countries where it is operating to send and receive funds, as well as create a virtual card, fund them and use them for online transactions.
Klasha claims to have processed nothing less than 20,000 transactions and has a customer base of 10,000. It also claims to have an average monthly growth rate of 366 percent. “For a lot of these retailers, this is the first time they’ve ever sold into Africa before. So we offer a complete end to end e-commerce suite for them as opposed to having to use disjointed services that aren’t interconnected with technology”, the fintech’s founder said.
“Klasha’s technology allows for seamless cross-border transactions at a time when Africa is rapidly growing and needs both payments and logistics solutions for online commerce. We’re excited to support Klasha and their mission in simplifying borderless payments for commerce in Africa”, Alison Lange Engel, a partner at Greycroft said.
Klasha wants to use the funds it acquired to help foreign retail businesses such as ASOS, Zara and H&M be able to receive payments from African consumers. Klasha also wants to continue to provide impeccable services and expand into other countries in Africa before the year’s end.
