Peach Payments, a leading electronic payments platform for entrepreneurs, SMEs and large enterprise businesses in South Africa, has raised growth funding to drive its expansion into Africa.

UW Ventures, in partnership with Allan Gray, has led this latest round of funding to accelerate product development and extend market reach. UW Ventures was joined in this financing round by industry experts as well as existing investors.

Peach Payments is enabling South African businesses to accelerate online commerce solutions and transform or pivot during Covid-19. Monthly customer acquisition has grown by 400% since February.

Several JSE listed companies have selected Peach Payments as their payments partner for their online commerce channels. “Our many new enterprise customers have aggressive timelines and are looking for easy to deploy payment solutions to speed up their time to market,” says Rahul Jain, co-founder of Peach Payments.

Peach Payments has established itself as a leader in online payment solutions with significant market share in the enterprise space, and a fast-growing SME base. This is aligned with UW Ventures and Allan Gray’s ethos of enabling SME growth and investing into South African entrepreneurs.

The company is growing revenue north of 100% per annum and has established a presence in both Mauritius and Kenya, with further market expansion planned over the medium term.

“We see significant revenue growth even during this crisis. This is being driven by the acceleration of consumer adoption of e-commerce and by developing more localized products for African merchants,” adds Jain. “Our relationship with UW Ventures and Allan Gray will further our ambition to help drive growth of digital commerce in Africa.”

Says Andreas Demleitner, co-founder of Peach Payments. “With this funding, we’ve expanded to include support for new platforms such as Xero and Wix – to make it easier for African start-ups and SMEs to easily take their business online.”

Harry Apostoleris, director at UW Ventures, says: “Peach Payments is rapidly capitalizing on the large digital payments opportunity through its modern platform and superior customer service. We have confidence that the company’s globally experienced leadership team will continue on this growth trajectory while further enhancing the customer value proposition.”

“Over the last five years, Peach Payments has proven itself as a payment gateway. The business is well positioned to take advantage of opportunities across the continent,” explains Nicolaas Botha, who is part of the Allan Gray ventures team.

Peach Payments enables global e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento and offers APIs for customised integrations. As a South African first, Peach Payments now allows entrepreneurs to use the popular Wix platform to build online businesses with market leading card processing and EFT solutions.