South African payments company Yoco has acquired Cape Town-based fintech and Web3 software development agency Nona Digital to accelerate its roadmap by bringing a team of highly-specialised fintech product and technology professionals into the Yoco team.
Yoco builds tools and services to help small businesses accept card payments in-store and online, access loans, and manage their day to day activities. The startup has become the preferred payments partner for over 150,000 small businesses across South Africa, processing more than US$1 billion in card payments per year.
The company, which secured US$83 million in Series C funding last July, has just acquired Nona Digital. Founded by Mike Scott, Ed O’Reilly, Gordon Angus and two others in Cape Town in 2012, Nona was created with a vision to deliver software products and teams at a standard that raises the level of the industry as a whole. Over the years, they have grown into true experts in the realm of fintech, with a particular flair for Web3 application development.
Yoco has been a Nona client since 2019, with the existing relationships, institutional knowledge and shared values the two organisations have cultivated to date meaning the Nona team can hit the ground running and accelerate the Yoco roadmap from day one.
“We are excited to welcome Nona and its team to Yoco. Nona is an industry leader behind some of the best digital banking and Web3 products both in the region and globally. All of this makes them a great fit for the direction we are taking and the evolution of our products. After working with the team for over a year, we realised that the cultural alignment between the two organisations and a shared passion for creating financial products for millions of self-employed Africans made working together a no brainer,” said Lungisa Matshoba, CTO at Yoco.
Mike Scott, CEO at Nona, said the company had spent the last 10 years building an exceptional team and capability in the fintech and Web3 space.
“This acquisition allows us to direct everything that we have built towards a vision and mission that we believe in, and that matters. It is a natural evolution for a strong services business to move into product and we are very excited to now be part of the Yoco story,” he said.
Yoco plans to be the primary financial platform for the self-employed in Africa and the Middle East, with ambitions to serve one million entrepreneurs by 2024 through its payments software and capital products. The company claims this type of team acquisition is especially effective in today’s context of high demand for talent.
This is the third and largest acquisition of a software development agency by Yoco since 2019, having acquired Cobi Interactive in 2019 and Dado in 2021. This latest addition takes Yoco’s team size up to 500 people, half of which are product and technology-focused.
Off the back of its Series C last year, Yoco is increasing its talent footprint across Africa, Europe and the Middle East.
“We have been bringing in talent aggressively across South Africa and other markets – employing people remotely across 15 geographies and in our talent hubs in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Amsterdam, Cairo and Dubai,” said Matshoba.
