Peach Payments enters Francophone Africa with PayDunya acquisition

By Gloria Methri

Digital payments gateway, Peach Payments, has acquired PayDunya, a Dakar-based FinTech operating in Francophone West Africa. This marks Peach Payments’ first entry into mainland Francophone Africa, following its expansions into Eswatini (2024), Mauritius (2021), and Kenya (2018).

Founded in 2015, PayDunya provides online payment solutions in six West African countries: Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Burkina Faso, Togo, and Mali. The platform enables businesses to send and receive payments on websites and mobile apps and manage bulk transactions. Its clients include Jeune Afrique, VFS Global, SUNU Assurances, Dubai Port Dakar, Sky Mali, and Yas.

PayDunya was co-founded by Aziz Yérima and three fellow entrepreneurs from Senegal, Togo, and Côte d’Ivoire after they identified a gap in the region’s digital payment infrastructure. The company has grown from an initial €20,000 in bootstrap financing to a profitable enterprise processing 70,000 transactions daily for over 4,000 B2B customers.

The acquisition will strengthen Peach Payments’ presence in Africa and expand its enterprise-grade payment solutions for businesses of all sizes.

“We are thrilled to join forces with Peach Payments, a company that shares our vision of accelerating Africa’s digital transformation through innovative financial solutions,” says Yérima. “This acquisition marks a significant milestone for PayDunya as it enables us to make our expansion dreams to reach and enhance the value we bring to businesses across Francophone and Anglophone Africa come true. Together, we are poised to create a seamless, inclusive, and robust payment ecosystem that empowers African businesses to thrive in the digital economy.

“The UEMOA region and neighbouring Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) region represent a tremendous opportunity for growth, with digital payments adoption increasing rapidly due to rising smartphone penetration and mobile money services. It is the early days for eCommerce and digital payments in these markets. By combining our expertise with Peach Payments’ capabilities, we are positioned to drive this growth and enable businesses to realise their full potential in the digital economy,” Yérima adds.

Rahul Jain, CEO and co-founder, Peach Payments said, “By integrating PayDunya, we are expanding our footprint into the UEMOA and CEMAC regions, unlocking new opportunities for merchants who can now partner with us and access over 450m people across the markets we operate in. Together, we can now offer seamless payment solutions across 12 countries, and we will continue to expand this coverage rapidly. This acquires PayDunya an obvious step for us, as we expand following our Series A funding round.”

This is the third deal Peach Payments has been involved with since late 2023, when it closed a €29m/$30m funding round led by the Apis Growth Fund II. In February 2024, the company acquired technology for in-store payments from Exipay, and in June 2024, Peach Payments acquired the customer software development firm Operativa to boost its engineering operations.