Yoco, the Cape Town-based payments platform that serves more than 200,000 small merchants, has acquired Dyner.ai, a South African startup that has built an AI-powered operating system for independent restaurants. The deal, announced today, marks a significant step in Yoco’s effort to evolve from a card-payments provider into a broader commerce and operations platform — and comes just days before a newly appointed German chief executive takes charge.
Founded by actuaries Thalentha Ngobeni and Chris du Plessis, both formerly of Discovery, Dyner has spent the past year quietly developing software that helps restaurant owners manage inventory, supplier workflows, reporting, margins and day-to-day operations. Several of its early customers, including coffee chain Plato Coffee, were already Yoco merchants, creating what both companies describe as a natural fit.
The acquisition price was not disclosed.
“From our earliest conversations, it was clear that we shared a deep belief in the importance of independent businesses to the South African economy and the role technology can play in helping them thrive,” said Carl Wazen, Yoco’s co-founder and chief business officer. “What impressed us most was not only the quality of the product, but the speed, intensity and ambition with which the Dyner team immersed themselves in the realities of running a restaurant and built their product alongside their customers.”
Why Dyner?
The acquisition is a targeted bet on the restaurant vertical, one of the largest and most operationally complex segments within Yoco’s merchant base. Independent restaurants typically juggle multiple fragmented tools — spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups, paper invoices — to manage purchasing, stock and profitability. Dyner’s proposition is an integrated, AI-native layer that pulls those workflows into a single interface and uses machine learning to surface trends, flag margin erosion and automate repetitive tasks.
Ngobeni, Dyner’s co-founder and CEO, framed the startup’s mission in strikingly similar terms to Yoco’s own origin story. “We founded Dyner with the belief that independent businesses deserve the same quality of operational technology and intelligence historically reserved for large enterprises,” she said. “After spending extensive time alongside restaurant operators, we are convinced that AI will fundamentally reshape how independent businesses operate over the next decade. Joining Yoco gives us the infrastructure, reach, and platform to accelerate that vision at a far greater scale.”
The Dyner team will continue to build its product independently while gradually integrating go-to-market, operational and support functions into Yoco’s broader platform. Over time, the intention is to make Dyner’s tooling available across Yoco’s merchant ecosystem, which spans food and beverage outlets, retailers and service businesses throughout South Africa.
A platform play long in the making
Yoco launched in 2015 with a simple proposition: give small merchants access to card payments at a time when incumbent banks largely ignored them. It has since grown into South Africa’s largest independent payments and point-of-sale platform, processing 30 million unique card taps a year and advancing billions of rand in working capital to merchants. In 2021, it closed an $83 million Series C round led by Dragoneer Investment Group, cementing its status as one of Africa’s flagship fintechs.
The next phase, as the company describes it, is the construction of a “smart commerce platform” — an integrated layer of AI, operational software and financial services that moves beyond payment acceptance into helping business owners run and grow their operations. Yoco argues that its deep transaction data and merchant relationships give it a competitive moat that bank-owned rivals and legacy software providers will struggle to replicate.
The Dyner acquisition fits squarely into that narrative. Wazen said the company sees AI reshaping how small businesses operate over the coming decade: reducing operational complexity, surfacing important trends earlier, automating repetitive work and enabling better decisions. Independent businesses account for an estimated 35–40% of South Africa’s economy and support around 60% of employment, yet most still lack access to sophisticated operational tools.
“As was the case with digital payments and previous technology waves, the earliest benefits of AI are largely prioritised for affluent consumers and large enterprises,” Wazen added. “Independent business owners are again left behind. Just as we helped democratise access to digital payments, we see a similar opportunity with AI.”
The Dyner deal lands at a moment of leadership transition at Yoco. On 1 June, Carsten Höltkemeyer, a German executive who previously ran Berlin-based embedded finance group Solaris and spent a decade as market CEO of Barclaycard Germany, will take over as chief executive. He replaces interim co-CEOs Bradley Wattrus and Lungisa Matshoba, who stepped into the role after founding CEO Katlego Maphai stepped back in September 2025.
Maphai, who led the company for a decade, said at the time that the skills needed to launch a business are not always the same ones required to scale it. The appointment of Höltkemeyer — an outsider with experience managing large, multi-product financial institutions — follows a pattern creeping across Africa’s venture-backed startups, where founder-CEOs are increasingly handing operational control to professional managers as their companies enter a second decade. In the past year, Ghanaian healthtech mPharma and Egyptian food delivery platform Elmenus both replaced founder-CEOs with experienced operators.
Yoco’s co-founders will return to functional leadership roles once the transition is complete: Wattrus as chief financial officer, Matshoba as chief product and technology officer, and Wazen as chief business officer. Maphai remains chairman and will stay involved in product and strategic questions. The company said it is not currently considering a public listing, pushing back against speculation that a professional CEO hire often signals IPO preparations.
Geographic expansion is, however, on the medium-term radar. While South Africa remains the “primary focus,” Yoco said it will “selectively explore adjacent markets in Africa” where the opportunity aligns with its strategic priorities and the capabilities built at home.
The competitive backdrop
Yoco’s software push comes as competition in South Africa’s SME fintech market intensifies. In 2025, Nedbank acquired Yoco competitor iKhokha for R1.65 billion (roughly €80 million at the time), a deal that recalibrated price expectations in the segment. Yoco had previously partnered with Nedbank on card issuance and acceptance, alongside iKhokha, HelloPay and Nightsbridge.
The Dyner acquisition also represents something of a homegrown technology moment: two South African companies combining to deliver tools that the founders say match the calibre of software available to independent businesses in more mature markets. Whether that combination — an AI restaurant operating system bolted onto a payments and capital platform — can deliver meaningful productivity gains for merchants will be the metric that matters.
For Höltkemeyer, whose experience includes restructuring a pan-European banking-as-a-service platform and running a consumer and merchant credit business inside a large bank, the challenge will be absorbing a decade of merchant co-creation and converting it into platform economics without diluting the founder-led commercial energy that built Yoco. His tenure will be watched closely as a test case for whether importing top-tier European operational talent can accelerate a local champion in one of Africa’s most watched tech markets.