Payments infrastructure company Moment has raised $22m in Series A funding, capital it will use to scale its collection and billing platform for enterprise merchants across Africa. The round was led by AlphaCode Venture Partners, with follow-on investment from General Catalyst and MultiChoice, and a first-time cheque from French media group Canal+.
The fresh equity brings Moment’s total funding to $55m since it launched three years ago. The Cape Town-headquartered company, which also has offices in Dubai, Johannesburg, Lagos, Kigali and London, builds payment acceptance and recurring billing tools for large corporates operating in African markets.
Africa’s payments landscape remains highly fragmented. In South Africa, over two-thirds of consumer transactions are still settled in person at retail points despite high bank account penetration. Nigeria’s market is dominated by instant bank transfers, alongside cash, cards and digital wallets. Elsewhere, mobile money services have filled the gap left by low banking coverage, but no single provider gives a merchant unified access to all these channels.
Moment attempts to solve that by aggregating locally preferred payment methods — cards, mobile money, real-time bank transfers, e-wallets, recurring bank debits and in-person payments — behind a single API and a set of low- and no-code tools. Chief executive Joel Yarbrough said the platform handles 600,000 transactions a day and reaches 10 million people a month through clients that include insurers, subscription platforms and other billers. It also operates an in-person acceptance network spanning more than two million physical locations.
“Within three years of launch, we are processing for some of Africa’s leading brands,” Yarbrough said. “We’ve built a platform that can deliver on the particular challenges of the African market and help businesses get paid faster and at lower cost.”
Dominique Collett, general partner at lead investor AlphaCode Venture Partners, described the region’s payment complexity as “a hidden tax on commerce” that Moment is dismantling. “We’re backing Joel and his team as they build a defining piece of Africa’s financial infrastructure,” she said.
The Series A comes as Canal+ deepens its relationship with the startup following its acquisition of MultiChoice, the South African pay-TV group that was an early Moment backer. Thomas Follin, Canal+’s chief diversification officer, said the company had been “genuinely impressed” after scrutinising Moment’s technology. “Moment has driven down cost and improved quality simultaneously,” he said. “Together we see a compelling opportunity to expand digital financial access across the continent.”
Moment’s product suite is geared toward subscription and instalment-based businesses. It offers recurring payment logic, customer outreach tools, failed payment recovery across digital and physical channels, and direct integrations into enterprise billing systems. The company also embeds reconciliation and back-office clearing features that it says help merchants receive funds faster.
Giulio di Giannatale, technical lead at South African insurer Sanlam, said the two firms were working on a roadmap that includes embedded insurance within payment flows and data-driven collection optimisation. “Moment is a genuine innovation partner,” he said. “This fundraise gives them the runway to accelerate what we’ve already proven works.”
The company will use the new capital to extend its network of local payment methods, invest in platform resilience, and push into additional African markets. It faces competition from a growing field of payment orchestrators and gateway providers targeting the continent, but its focus on enterprise recurring revenue collection places it in a more specialised niche.
Moment is also backed by Entree Capital, the Raba Partnership and Helios Investment Partners. Its Series A underscores continued venture interest in African fintech infrastructure, even as investors become more selective in a tighter funding environment.