Merchant infrastructure platform littlefish has announced the close of a $9.5 million Series A funding round, led by Partech, with participation from TLCOM, Flourish Ventures and Proparco.
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littlefish positions itself at the intersection of banking infrastructure and commerce enablement. Its platform consolidates multiple merchant-facing tools into a unified system. These include point-of-sale (POS) applications, merchant portals, back-office CRM tools, payments infrastructure and API integrations with core banking systems.
The system integrates directly with POS devices and banking infrastructure allowing financial institutions to offer fintech-grade merchant services while maintaining control over customer relationships.
The company already works with major banking institutions such as Standard Bank, First National Bank and Absa.
littlefish has also established a strategic partnership with Visa, integrating its platform into Visa’s small business onboarding strategy.
According to the company, its monthly recurring revenue has grown 30x since its seed round.
Brandon Roberts, Co-Founder and CEO of littlefish, emphasized the company’s approach of working through established financial institutions rather than bypassing them:
“The best way to serve Africa’s small businesses is to work with the institutions they already trust.”
He added that the company has already validated its model in South Africa and is now using the new capital to expand across the continent.
With the new funding, littlefish plans to expand into 10+ African markets, including Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia. It also plans to strengthen its presence in South Africa and grow its engineering, product and go-to-market teams.
Matthieu Marchand, Principal at Partech, said, “littlefish has done something rare: it has built indispensable infrastructure and convinced Africa’s most powerful financial institutions to stake their merchant businesses on it.”
“When we backed littlefish at the seed stage, we believed in the team’s vision for what bank-embedded merchant infrastructure could become in South Africa and other emerging markets,” said Ameya Upadhyay, General Partner at Flourish Ventures. “Since then, they’ve built deliberately, earned the trust of the largest institutions on the continent, and created a platform that banks need. Participating in this Series A round was an easy decision. littlefish’s traction speaks for itself, and we’re excited to see what comes next.”
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