On March 9, 2026, two Cape Town-based companies raised a combined $4.45 million in seed funding within hours of each other. Neither makes consumer apps. Neither lends money. Both are quietly building the infrastructure layer that makes African payments more reliable, and their simultaneous closes are a signal about where sophisticated investors now see the real value in African fintech.
NjiaPay — a payment orchestration platform founded by Jonatan Allback and Roderick Simons — raised $2.1 million from Dutch venture firm Newion. On the same day, Orca Fraud — a real-time fraud intelligence company founded by Thalia Pillay and Carla Wilby — closed an oversubscribed $2.35 million seed round led by Norrsken22, with participation from OneDayYes, Enza Capital, and CV VC Africa. The two companies are not related, but they are solving adjacent problems in the same ecosystem, and the timing of their fundraises is not coincidental in the way it might appear.
The Problem Both Companies Are Solving
African businesses integrating payments face two compounding challenges: fragmentation and fraud. The fragmentation problem means a company operating across multiple African markets typically needs five or six separate payment provider integrations — each with its own API, documentation, compliance requirements, and failure modes. The fraud problem means that even after payments are routed and processed, a growing share of them are fraudulent. INTERPOL’s December 2025 to January 2026 Africa operation resulted in 651 arrests across 16 countries and uncovered scams linked to over $45 million in losses — a partial snapshot of a much larger problem.
NjiaPay addresses the fragmentation side. The platform functions as a payment router: businesses connect once, and NjiaPay dynamically routes each transaction to whichever provider is performing best at that moment — highest success rate, lowest latency, best fee structure. The founders built NjiaPay after experiencing the problem first-hand at Talk360, an international calling app serving African markets where multiple payment providers operate across different countries and connectivity conditions. After consolidating six separate integrations into NjiaPay, Talk360 recorded a 25 percent increase in checkout conversion in key markets. That number is the company’s core sales pitch: payment success rates, not just payment access, as a business outcome.
Orca Fraud addresses the other side of the transaction. Once a payment is routed and approved, the question is whether it is legitimate. Orca embeds adaptive fraud intelligence directly into live payment flows, processing over $5 billion in monthly transaction volume across more than 70 countries. The platform works with banks, telcos, and payment providers to make real-time, context-aware fraud decisions without slowing legitimate transactions — a balance that has historically been difficult to achieve in high-volume, mobile-first African payment environments where fraud patterns are geographically specific and evolve quickly.
South Africa’s B2B Infrastructure Moment
The investment thesis connecting both companies is the same one that drove Cybervergent’s $3 million round in Lagos three days earlier: African enterprise infrastructure is becoming a standalone, investable asset class. The first wave of African fintech investment went to consumer-facing payments (Flutterwave, Wave, Chipper Cash). The second wave went to credit infrastructure (FairMoney, Moove, LemFi). What is now emerging is a third wave focused on the plumbing that makes the entire payment ecosystem more reliable — orchestration, fraud intelligence, compliance automation — sold B2B to the banks, telcos, and payment processors that already have the customer base.
Cape Town is a notable clustering point for this infrastructure layer. Both NjiaPay and Orca Fraud are headquartered there, though NjiaPay also maintains offices in Amsterdam and Johannesburg. South Africa’s financial services sector is the continent’s most regulated and most technically sophisticated, which means infrastructure startups building there are immediately tested against demanding enterprise buyers — large banks, major telcos, established payment processors — rather than being able to grow in a less scrutinised environment. The standard is higher, but so is the signal when a company achieves meaningful commercial traction.
Orca’s round being oversubscribed is particularly noteworthy. An oversubscribed seed round in the current African venture environment — where many Series A and B rounds have been repriced and investor caution is elevated — means the company had more credible investors wanting in than it could accommodate at the target size. Norrsken22, the lead investor, has built a deliberate reputation for backing African companies working on high-impact infrastructure problems. Its presence at the top of the round is a quality signal.
What Comes Next
NjiaPay’s $2.1 million will fund geographic expansion — the company is targeting growth beyond South Africa into additional African markets where payment fragmentation is severe. The model is well-suited to markets like Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana where multiple payment providers compete for the same merchant relationships and provider reliability varies significantly by corridor and transaction type.
Orca’s $2.35 million is earmarked for scaling the fraud intelligence platform across Africa and MENA — a region where the fraud surface area is expanding rapidly as mobile payment volumes grow and financial inclusion initiatives bring new, less fraud-experienced users into the formal financial system.
Neither company is trying to replace a payment provider or become a bank. They are building the connective tissue around existing infrastructure. In that respect, both are making the same bet: that as African digital commerce scales, the value will increasingly sit not with the companies that originate transactions but with the ones that make every transaction more reliable, more secure, and more likely to complete. On March 9, investors in Cape Town agreed — twice.
— Business Reporter, BETAR.africa
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