Payments orchestration start-up NjiaPay has raised $2.1 million in seed funding, with the investment round led by European SaaS-focused venture capital firm Newion.
The company said the new capital will be used to expand its engineering and commercial teams, strengthen technical integrations and accelerate its expansion across African markets.
Founded in late 2024 by Jonatan Allback and Roderick Simons, NjiaPay was created after the founders encountered persistent challenges while scaling Talk360, an international calling app that serves customers across Africa. The Talk360 team struggled with the complexity of managing multiple payment service providers (PSPs), each with different integration requirements, success rates, reporting formats and reliability levels.
This experience led to the creation of NjiaPay, which is designed as a neutral orchestration and coordination layer that sits on top of a merchant’s existing PSP infrastructure.
Addressing Africa’s fragmented payment ecosystem
NjiaPay enables merchants to route transactions through a single application programming interface (API). Its orchestration engine automatically selects the best-performing payment service provider for each transaction in real time while consolidating performance data into a single dashboard.
Rather than replacing existing PSPs, the platform optimises them, helping merchants improve payment success rates while reducing operational complexity.
The company said recurring revenue and subscription-based businesses are particularly vulnerable to payment failures. As many as 20 per cent of transactions fail due to issues such as expired or replaced cards.
To address this challenge, NjiaPay is introducing tools such as Card Account Updater, a solution that has been widely used in Europe for more than a decade but remains underutilised in South Africa. The tool automatically updates stored customer card details, helping businesses reduce involuntary churn and prevent avoidable transaction declines.
After integrating NjiaPay, Talk360 reduced its PSP integrations from six to one and recorded a 25 per cent increase in checkout conversion across key African markets.
Hans Osnabrugge, chief executive of Talk360, noted: “By tackling the complexity of the African payment ecosystem, NjiaPay has freed Talk360 to focus on growth.”
NjiaPay has been fully operational for about a year and has intensified its focus on South African businesses over the past eight months. Its growing client base includes Talk360, Anytime Fitness and Melon Mobile.
The company currently employs about 20 people across the Netherlands and South Africa, with its headquarters in Amsterdam and offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
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