Yoco
Yoco
About
Yoco is one of Africa’s most recognised fintech companies, built on a straightforward but consequential premise: small businesses across South Africa deserve the same access to card payment infrastructure that larger retailers take for granted. Since its founding in 2015, the Cape Town-based company has grown from a hardware startup selling plug-in card readers into a broader merchant services platform serving hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses.
The company was co-founded by Katlego Maphai, Carl Wazen, Bradley Wattrus, and Lungisa Matshoba — a team that combined experience in product design, finance, and technology. Their founding insight was that South Africa’s informal and semi-formal small business economy was being left behind by incumbent banks, whose merchant acquiring services were expensive, slow to onboard, and designed for larger clients. Yoco set out to remove those barriers.
The company’s stated mission is to enable small businesses to thrive by giving them the tools to get paid, manage cash flow, and grow. That mission has remained consistent even as the product suite has expanded well beyond its original card reader hardware.
Country and ecosystem
South Africa occupies a distinctive position in the African startup landscape. Cape Town and Johannesburg together form one of the continent’s most mature venture ecosystems, with deep pools of technical talent, a sophisticated financial services sector, and relatively well-developed regulatory frameworks for fintech. The country has produced a disproportionate share of Africa’s late-stage startups, and its SME economy — estimated to account for a significant share of private sector employment — represents a large and underserved addressable market for digital financial services. At the same time, South Africa’s founders navigate real structural challenges: persistent inequality, infrastructure constraints, and an economy that has faced prolonged growth headwinds. Those conditions have, in some respects, sharpened the focus of companies like Yoco on solving practical, ground-level problems for business owners. → Read the South Africa expert briefing
Product
Yoco’s core product remains its point-of-sale card payment hardware — portable card readers that allow merchants to accept Visa, Mastercard, and other card payments without the complexity or cost of traditional bank-issued terminals. The devices are designed for ease of use and are sold or distributed directly to merchants, with a transparent fee-per-transaction model rather than monthly minimums or lengthy contracts.
Beyond hardware, Yoco has built out a software layer that includes a business dashboard, sales analytics, and invoicing tools. The company has also moved into capital products, offering merchant cash advances to qualifying businesses — a move that positions Yoco closer to the embedded finance model that has defined the ambitions of SME-focused fintechs globally. Its customers are predominantly small and micro businesses: market traders, food vendors, independent retailers, service providers, and the broad informal-to-formal economy that defines much of South Africa’s commercial activity.
Traction and funding
Yoco has raised substantial venture capital across multiple rounds and is considered one of South Africa’s most well-funded fintech companies. The company’s most notable fundraise was a $83 million Series C round closed in 2021, led by Dragoneer Investment Group, with participation from existing investors including Partech Africa, Quona Capital, and FMO, among others. That round was one of the largest single fintech raises in South African history at the time and gave the company significant runway to invest in product and scale.
In terms of merchant reach, Yoco has publicly referenced processing payments for hundreds of thousands of businesses, though the company has not publicly disclosed exact figures on current active merchant counts or annualised payment volumes. According to recent ecosystem reports, Yoco is consistently cited among the top merchant acquirers serving the SME segment in South Africa.
Competitive landscape
Yoco operates in a competitive but still underpenetrated market. Its most direct competitors in South Africa include iKhokha, which targets a similar small merchant audience with card readers and business tools, and PayFast (now part of the Network International group), which focuses more heavily on e-commerce payment processing. Peach Payments competes in the online gateway space. Internationally, the structural comparison is often made to Square (now Block) in the United States or SumUp in Europe — companies that similarly disrupted incumbent acquiring banks by targeting underserved small merchants with simple hardware and transparent pricing.
Yoco’s differentiation rests on several factors: its brand recognition and trust among South African small business owners, its integrated software and capital products, and the depth of its merchant relationships built over nearly a decade of operation. Its move into lending gives it a data advantage that pure payment processors lack.
Recent developments
In the period from approximately 2023 to early 2026, Yoco has focused on deepening its product platform rather than pursuing aggressive geographic expansion. The company has invested in its capital and lending products, refining its merchant cash advance offering as a meaningful revenue stream alongside transaction fees. There have also been reported efforts to strengthen its software ecosystem, with tools aimed at helping merchants manage inventory, track sales trends, and handle basic business administration — a deliberate push to increase stickiness and reduce churn.
Like many late-stage African startups operating in the post-2022 funding environment, Yoco has navigated a more cautious global venture market. The company has not publicly announced a new major funding round in this period, and according to recent ecosystem reports, its strategic emphasis has shifted toward sustainable unit economics and profitability pathways rather than growth-at-all-costs expansion.
Outlook
Yoco enters the mid-2020s with a strong brand, a large installed merchant base, and a product suite that is meaningfully broader than when it launched. The next logical milestone for the company is demonstrating a credible path to profitability — or, alternatively, a strategic outcome such as an acquisition or public listing — that validates the capital invested to date. Geographic expansion into other African markets remains a possibility that the company has discussed publicly, though it has moved cautiously on this front, recognising that each new market brings its own regulatory and operational complexity.
Headwinds include South Africa’s sluggish macroeconomic environment, which constrains small business spending and increases credit risk in its lending products, as well as intensifying competition from both local players and international platforms eyeing the African SME payments opportunity. The tailwind, however, is structural: card and digital payment adoption among South African small businesses is still growing, and the shift away from cash continues to expand Yoco’s addressable market. For investors and ecosystem watchers, Yoco remains one of the clearest bellwethers for the maturation of African fintech.
