Zrosk Investment Administration, a local venture capital firm, sponsored a $11.4 million Series A round for ZirooPay, an agency banking startup based in Nigeria’s commercial city, Lagos State.
According to the firm, the funding would help it develop its product features as well as grow its personnel.
ZirooPay is an app-based platform that uses fintech to make payments easier. Users may make payments, configure VAT, and issue refunds via the company’s proprietary app.
Ziroopay CEO, Omoniyi Olawale, said one of the biggest challenges to the mass adoption of card payments at retail locations is the rate of transaction failures as a result of poor internet connection.
He noted that its mobile application allows small businesses across the retail, agency banking, hospitality and services sectors to perform similar tasks, such as tracking sales and managing business operations.
“Think about everything that the cash registers seen in big supermarkets can do; with an Android application and a mobile point-of-sale card reader, we provide that same functionality to small businesses,” he said.
According to him, within three months of onboarding over 70 per cent of ZirooPay users migrated from paper-based accounting to depend on in-app sales accounting.
Samson Esemuede, Zrosk’s Managing Director and Chief Investment Officer, commented on the development, saying that the offline economy has eclipsed the online economy, and that the situation is benefiting the business.
He said: “The growth in the online economy of the African continent has been remarkable; however, the offline economy is orders of magnitude larger than the online economy.
“ZirooPay has a patented technology advantage (that works without an internet connection) and distribution model that significantly increases the odds of digitizing the offline economy at a unit cost that makes the story particularly compelling.
“The payment space has become well-resourced and competitive, but the white space we see in the digitization of cash is the reason we are optimistic about the outlook for this investment.”
