A Johannesburg-based fintech startup that has quietly embedded itself into the merchant operations of South Africa’s three largest banks has closed a $9.5 million (R152 million) Series A round, using the capital to push its bank-integrated merchant infrastructure across more than ten African markets.
Littlefish, founded in 2021 by Brandon Roberts and Miod Davith Kahwa, operates as a white-labelled software-as-a-service platform that plugs directly into banks’ core systems and point-of-sale devices, giving financial institutions a single orchestration layer for payments, merchant portals, back-office customer relationship management tools and application programming interfaces. Rather than competing with banks or building a direct-to-consumer product, the company sells infrastructure to the institutions that small businesses already use — a model that has won it contracts with Standard Bank, First National Bank and Absa, as well as a partnership with Visa, which has integrated the platform into its small business onboarding process. Monthly recurring revenue has grown 30 times since the company’s seed round, underscoring rising demand for embedded merchant infrastructure among traditional financial institutions.
The Series A was led by Paris-based Partech, with participation from TLcom Capital, Flourish Ventures and Proparco — the development finance arm of the French government. TLcom and Flourish were also investors in littlefish’s previous funding round in 2024, marking continued conviction from its earliest institutional backers. This marks Partech’s second major investment in South Africa in 2026.
The new capital will fund team expansion, accelerated product development and market entry into Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia, among others.
The strategic logic rests on the structural fragmentation of Africa’s SME financial services landscape. Small businesses across the continent typically operate across a patchwork of disconnected tools — a point-of-sale system, a separate bank account, spreadsheets for inventory and a standalone accounting package. That fragmentation is both operationally inefficient and a growing security liability, with a South African study finding that over 70% of SMEs have experienced at least one attempted cyberattack.
By consolidating these layers into a single platform delivered through the bank, littlefish allows financial institutions to offer fintech-grade services while retaining direct ownership of the merchant relationship — an arrangement that has historically been ceded to third-party payment and commerce providers.
According to Disrupt Africa, informal businesses account for up to 90% of all enterprises on the continent, creating structural demand for solutions that work through trusted institutions rather than displacing them. The International Finance Corporation estimates that fewer than one in three African companies, particularly small and micro enterprises, fully leverage digital tools — a gap that represents both the challenge and the commercial opportunity littlefish is targeting. Africa’s 80 million SMEs remain significantly underserved by formal financial infrastructure, and the growing body of evidence suggests that the most scalable route to closing that gap runs through banks rather than around them.
Partech’s investment thesis was built on the observation that littlefish had achieved something rare in African fintech — convincing the continent’s most powerful financial institutions to stake their merchant businesses on a single external infrastructure layer, a bar that competing platforms had not cleared.
The expansion into East Africa, where mobile money ecosystems such as M-Pesa dominate merchant transactions, will test whether the bank-integrated model translates into markets where non-bank digital wallets have already captured significant merchant relationships. In Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, littlefish will need to demonstrate that its bank-first approach can coexist with or complement mobile money rails rather than positioning itself as an alternative.