A fintech from Ivory Coast — part of one of the most economically challenged and financially fragmented regions in the world — has raised funding for an ambitious goal: to become the ‘Stripe for Francophone Africa’. HUB2, as the startup is called, already works with some 55 neobanks, payment companies, remittance companies and cryptocurrency providers, and it has now picked up $8.5 million to expand that list, and to up its game in its tech stack.
Pan-African early-stage investor TLcom Capital is leading the Series A funding, with FMO, Enza Capital, BPI France, and Eric Barbier, the founder of Thunes, among the longer list of investors.
Ashley Gauzere, a former telecom engineer who previously worked for Orange Africa and the Middle East, founded HUB2 in 2019 after noticing the particular challenges in the region’s e-commerce industry.
Merchants looking to work with mobile banking providers (consumers’ and businesses’ phone accounts double as bank accounts in many developing countries) often find it hard to sell regionally since mobile money operators and banks in Francophone African countries operate in silos due to regulations and variances across banking systems. On the other side of the transaction, reaching last-mile consumers for some of these financial institutions was difficult due to low banking penetration. Payment issues like fragmentation, interoperability gaps, and collection challenges are widespread.
Inspired by Stripe, the U.S. juggernaut now valued at $70 billion, Gauzere saw an opportunity to build an offering that could knit together complex operations behind an API that companies could use to make it easier for them to take payments and manage transactions. (Gauzere is not the only one: the founders of Nigeria’s Paystack had ambitions to become a Stripe-like provider for English-speaking Africa; that venture scaled enough to eventually get the attention of Stripe, which acquired it.)
“The one issue I wanted to solve in French-speaking Africa after two decades in telecom and seeing the need for high-quality, interoperable payment solutions was creating infrastructure and unifying payments in the region like a Stripe-like platform,” he remarked.
HUB2 claims to offer “comprehensive coverage and seamless integration across payment methods,” partnering with mobile money providers like Wave, Orange, MTN, Moov, Free, and T-Money, and it simplifies payments by enabling fintechs to collect mobile money, bank transfers, card payments and cryptocurrency through a single API.
Targeting payment providers and fintechs as customers was not HUB2’s first strategy. It wasn’t even its second strategy.
Initially, Gauzere thought the big opportunity was in targeting independent e-commerce merchants directly.
It found that the market was still too small, however, so it shifted focus to large corporates in the region looking to transition from cash to digital payments. That led the company to expand its services to include payment collections via mobile money, bank cards, and point-of-sale.
For over a year, HUB2 followed that strategy and focused on the insurance sector, which then led to attention from buzzy fintechs like Ivorian YC-backed Djamo. That led to the company to pivoting a third time, serving fintechs exclusively. These are now responsible for 98% of its volumes.
Today, HUB2 operates as the backbone for 55 fintechs across French-speaking Africa — they include Julaya, Onafriq, NALA, and CinetPay — providing payment infrastructure for these companies to power their operations. This alignment with fintechs helped HUB2 achieve product-market fit and drove its growth over the last three years.
The payment aggregator is on track to process €1 billion in transaction volume (TPV) this year — a marked increase from the €70 million it handled in 2022 — fueled by consistent 15% month-over-month growth in both TPV and revenue, which comes from take rates on these volumes.
“We have a very horizontal play, and our goal is to offer all payment methods—from mobile money and cards to banking and cryptocurrencies—covering the entire footprint for fintechs,” explained Jean-Rémi Kouchakji, who joined HUB2 as co-CEO in 2023.
He added that focus is important for it at this stage. “If you want to offer everything with the right licenses, perfect compliance, and technical excellence, verticalizing everything isn’t exactly feasible,” he said.
But as it scales, the company may still turn to serving smaller businesses in the longer term.
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) account for 90% of businesses in Africa, making them a crucial segment that cannot be overlooked. It would also put it in line with competition. Paystack and Flutterwave, for example, have scaled by addressing the needs of enterprise clients and small businesses, a model HUB2 could emulate to expand its reach.
Similarly, the five-year-old fintech is ramping up efforts to prop up its payment infrastructure in general.
According to co-CEO Ashley Gauzere, mobile money has driven most of HUB2’s transactions, with less uptake for other payment methods such as credit cards, bank transfers, and cryptocurrency, showing that its idea of a fully interoperable ecosystem is still developing.
To address this, HUB2 will roll out cross-border payment solutions, introduce stablecoin-based remittance services, and expand its card payment capabilities by deepening its integration with CyberSource, Visa’s payment processing platform, across more African markets. Currently, it operates in six Francophone African countries: Senegal, Burkina Faso, Benin, Togo, and Cameroon, but is targeting full regional coverage within the next two years.
The five-year-old fintech has a 35-person team across three offices in France, Ivory Coast, and Mauritius.
“We’re proud to work with HUB2 as the company extends its reach across Francophone Africa,” said Eloho Omame, partner at TLcom Capital. “HUB2’s achievements in the region, combined with TLcom’s track record in Anglophone markets, create a powerful partnership that will make digital payments more accessible across the continent.”
