ZirooPay Secures $11.4 Million In Its Series A Round Led By Lagos-based VC Fund Zrosk Investment Management

ZirooPay, a provider of mobile POS solutions, has raised $11.4 million in its Series A financing round led by Lagos and Helsinki-based venture capital firm Zrosk Investment Management. The round also saw the participation of other investors including existing investors – Nordic Ventures and Inventure, new investors – Fedha Capital and Exotix Advisory and individual investors namely; Abiodun Ajai, the director, Sub-Saharan Africa of Bank of America; Jonas Dromberg, former Bureau chief at Bloomberg; and Petri Kivinen, the former managing director at Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Renaissance Capital.

ZirooPay’s plan for the new capital is to use it to expand its payments infrastructure, hire new talents as well as boost its growth. ZirooPay is a subsidiary of IroFit, a mobile platform that allowed small businesses to accept payments using a mobile app and an EMV-certified card reader, without the access to the internet.

ZirooPay was launched five years after CEO Omoniyi Olawale promised a launch in Nigeria after IroFit’s seed financing round of $600,000. According to him, the Nigeria launch was delayed because the company was improving its technology – it had to factor in the Nigerian realities to provide well-tailored solutions.

ZirooPay has been in operation for about three years now and has seen what can be termed astronomical growth. The company says it currently has more than 15,000 merchants using its POS terminals and mobile application. The company added that these merchants have cumulatively processed $500 million from more than 10 million transactions. Its processing numbers have seen a 5,000 percent increase since the company started three years ago.

Speaking on the decision to make ZirooPay work without access to the internet, CEO Omoniyi Olawale cited the challenges faced by retailers disallowing them from receiving payments as a result of no or poor internet connections. “That led to us creating our in-house technology we have a patent for that allows us to process those events in real time without internet connection. So the product got built around that major problem; with that, we can identify to provide a 95% transaction success rate against the less than 50% that you find in the market,” he said.

He also explained that ZirooPay is an all-in-one solution for merchants. While many merchants do not have a way to keep their books automatically or have to rely on other bookkeeping platforms to do that, ZirooPay’s mobile app lets small business to track sales and manage business operations – performing bookkeeping capabilities faster.

Explaining how this works, the CEO said that “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,” adding that “We’ve been able to see over 70% of our users migrate from paper-based accounting to depend on the in-app sales accounting within three months of onboarding.”

ZirooPay is banking on its solution and wants to become a market leader in the retail banking space. “No major company is coming in with modern technology trying to tackle this space and that’s one area that we see an opportunity for us because we are primarily a retail payment platform. Even though we provide agency banking on the side, our focus is on retail, and that’s something that differentiates us from the other players,” ZirooPay’s CEO 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.,” Samson Esemuede, the managing director and chief investment officer of Zrosk commented.

With its technology that requires no access to the internet, ZirooPay will not only revolutionize the retail baking space, but it could also become one of the most sought-after providers of the service.