Stripe has announced its acquisition of Pastack, a start up in Lagos, Nigeria. The company provided similar service with Stripe.
The company offers a quick way to integrate payments services into an online or offline transaction by way of an API (It has also been referred to in the past as “the stripe of Africa.”
Currently, Pastack has about 600,000 customers, which included small businesses, large corporates, fintech, education institutions and online betting companies.
The company also disclosed that these was plan for it to continue operating independently.
Although terms of the deal were not disclosed, but sources closed to the deal disclosed that it is over $200million. This made it the biggest startup acquisition that will come out of Nigeria till date and the biggest stripe acquisition everywhere to date.
Stripe has grown by acquiring smaller companies to expand its technological domain, rather than its global footprint.
In one interview, Stripe’s Co-Founder and CEO, Patrick Collison, said, “In absolute numbers, Africa may be smaller right now than other regions, but online commerce will grow about 30% every year. And even with wider global declines, online shoppers are growing twice as fast. Stripe thinks on a longer time horizon than others because we are an infrastructure company. We are thinking of what the world will look like in 2040-2050.”
On his part, the CEO of Paystack, Sola Akinlade, in an interview said the deal will give the company a lot of investments.
He said, “Paystack was not for sale when Stripe approached us,” said Akinlade, who co-founded the company with Ezra Olubi (who is the CTO). “For us, it’s about the mission. I’m driven by the mission to accelerate payments on the continent, and I am convinced that Stripe will help us get there faster. It is a very natural move.”
