Payourse, a Blockchain firm based in Lagos, Nigeria has raised $600k in pre-seed funding to build a Web3 powerhouse.
Bashir Aminu, the CEO of Payourse told Techpoint Africa on a call that it took some time before everything came to be and before the pre-seed fund could be realized. The fundraising pre-seed saw participation from Michael Ugwu, one of the biggest NFT collectors, Flori Ventures, Olumide Soyombo of Voltron Capital, and Allegory Capital. The pre-seed funding also saw the participation of other investors like CELO co-founders, Marek Olszewski and Rene Reinseberg, Kola Aina of Ventures platform, Angel Touch Holdings, and Oluwatobi Anisere.
This funding is the company’s first real pre-seed funding, with a combination of $100,000 raise from Michael Ugwu, in March 2021, another $100,000 from Flori Ventures in July 2021, and another raise from Oluwatobi Anisere, co-founder, John Anisere’s brother in 2020.
Aminu says they never actually reached out to investors. Michael Ugwu had sent a direct message to one of the co-founders on Twitter, Flori Ventures, and Olamide Soyombo , Founder of Volton Capital got introduced through a partner.
Payourse was founded in September 2019 by Bashir Aminu (CEO) and John Anisere (CTO) with the aim and purpose of solving the issues of accessibility and adoption of the Web3 economy by way of providing the core infrastructure and necessary tools that will help African businesses build user-friendly crypto and Web3 products.
Bashir Aminu got the idea of building a platform that collects wallet addresses and generates shareable links while he was still working at Busha as its first product designer, a crypto exchange that recently just raised a $4.2 million pre-seed funding. He shared the idea with John Anisere, who was his colleague and a front-end designer at Busha.
Anisere bought the idea and they launched into action after deliberating on a few concepts. In September 2019, Coinprofile was launched as a pet project and the company’s first product.
Due to a seamless experience and ease of use, Coinprofile began to gain traction amongst crypto users. The more people got on their product, the more the founders realized how important their product is, Hence, they continued to look for products fit for the market, they also took customers’ feedbacks to improve Coinprofile.
Aminu said to TechCabal, “In May 2020, after acquiring a handful of users and considering the feedback and requests we’ve pulled, we added a remittance functionality that allows users make payment with their wallets”.
According to Aminu, the CEO, during the process of building plenty of Web3 tools and APIs around Coinprofile products, it became clear that they have not only built a great crypto tool, they have also built great infrastructures, powerful and flexible enough for other businesses to build and thrive on.
The company announced last month that it would be bringing together all its present and future products under a parent company, Payourse. The parent company has three main functions to power its infrastructure; wallets, remittances, and liquidity. The company said it has started building uses cases to show its ambition to power the next hundreds of crypto-enabled businesses, it has built Simpa, which is a fast no-code and an easy platform made available to anyone to quickly start a fully customizable crypto exchange as fast as possible.
Payourse believes that the future of finance and in Africa is on crypto, and thus, is determined to help more African businesses and individuals get in line, by being the go-to platform for anything concerning crypto anywhere in the world. Payourse already marked Kenya and Ghana as the next markets to carry out that ambition.
Payourse A Nigeria-Based Startup Raises $600 Fund To Build A Web3 Powerhouse
