MoneyHash raises $4.5m seed funding to facilitate payments in MEA

By Delisha Fernandes

MoneyHash, a payment orchestration platform in the Middle East and Africa (MEA), has raised $4.5 million in a seed funding round.

The round was co-led by COTU Ventures and Sukna Ventures, with participation from RZM Investment, Dubai Future District Fund, VentureFriends, and a group of strategic investors and operators.

This funding will enable MoneyHash to further invest in its technology and expand its business growth initiatives across the region.

The complexity of the ecosystem is compounded by the region’s susceptibility to payment fraud, low checkout conversion rates, and increased transaction failures. “COVID certainly boosted the adoption of digital payments in the region, but the infrastructure remains significantly underdeveloped. In MEA, payment failure rates are three times the global average, and fraud rates and cart abandonment are over 20% higher than in all other regions. This places merchants in a challenging position, viewing payments as a cost and risk center rather than a strategic enabler,” said Nader Abdelrazik, co-founder and CEO of MoneyHash.

The payment landscape in the MEA is highly fragmented. Each country has tens of payment providers and methods, developing payment regulations, limited economic integration with other markets, and a diverse set of customer preferences and market dynamics.

MoneyHash’s product includes a unified API to integrate pay-in and pay-out rails, a fully customizable checkout experience, transaction routing capabilities with fraud and failure rate optimizers, and a centralized transaction reporting hub. This is complemented by tools enabling various use cases such as virtual wallets, subscription management, and payment links.

MoneyHash offers a comprehensive payment operating system as a service to address the various technological and product challenges faced by enterprise merchants. Elena Panchenko, the Chief Product Officer of MoneyHash, said, “Payment challenges are intertwined. Rather than merchants juggling between solutions and in-house fixes, we offer a versatile suite to address current and future challenges simultaneously.”