Revio raises USD 1.1 mln in seed funding

The round was joined by participating investors of the likes of RaliCap Ventures, The Fund, and Two Culture Capital, with several angel investors including payment and revenue recovery experts from Sequoia, Quona Capital, and Circle Payments also being involved. This marks the company’s first institutional funding round since emerging from stealth in March 2021.

The funding is to be used for the launch of new products, expansion of the team, and entering of new emerging markets, all contributing to Revio’s mission of reducing payment failures and disturbance. Its solutions for payments orchestration, billion automation, and revenue recovery aim to enable businesses to recover lost transactions either passively, actively, and proactively, to increase revenue, to optimise cashflow, and to increase customer lifetime value. Speaking on the announcement, Revio officials have stated that the company has ambitions in building a global business that enables other businesses to reduce failed payments and recover revenue they have earned, looking to accelerate the company’s growth by having partnered with an investor community, and to deliver value to their customers. 

Digital payments in Africa and Revio’s product offering

As per information provided in the company’s press release, in Africa, 2-3 out of every 10 payments fail, as opposed to the 0.7 global average. Part of the reasoning for this includes a fragmented payments landscape, higher dispute rates, invalid or expired card details, false-positive fraud checks, multiple or dormant accounts, and insufficient funds, with the high failure rates resulting in lost revenue worth billions of dollars. In Africa alone, an estimate of USD 14 billion in recurring revenue is uncollected on a yearly basis, with the continent having a 320% higher churn rate than mature markets.

As digital payments are expected to grow 20% year-on-year, the problem is believed to intensify as, although gateways and aggregators have it simpler for businesses to accept multiple payments methods, there are little solutions that deal with payment failures. As such, Revio aims to build a category-leading product to enable businesses to improve their cashflow management and accelerate growth believing that, with the African payments landscape being fragmented, the company will play a critical role in contributing to the growth of subscription commerce and companies with pan-African scale.

As of now, Revio’s API can be integrated by businesses to accept and reconcile over 20 payment methods across more than 25 African markets to increase their payment success rate and automate revenue operations.

Having at its basis the insight that ‘there’s more to getting paid than accepting payments’ Revio’s product offering includes:

By combining these capabilities with real-time customer segmentation and analysis, businesses are enabled to increase their customer lifetime value and direct collections effort toward the customers with the highest return on investment. Businesses can access all these functionalities through a single integration, thus being able to simplify complexity, accelerate speed to market, and increase revenue and customer lifetime value.