Moment, the pan-African payments company that grew out of MultiChoice’s fintech ambitions, has closed a US$22-million (R364-million) series-A funding round led by AlphaCode Venture Partners, taking the total it has raised since inception to $55-million.

The round includes follow-on investment from existing backers General Catalyst and MultiChoice, and fresh money from Canal+, the French media group that now owns MultiChoice outright and listed on the JSE in June. The Cape Town-based company said it will use the capital to deepen its payments network, improve its platform and push further into African markets.

It is the second round of roughly this size Moment has raised: a seed extension in May 2024 brought in about $21.7-million and valued the business at $82-million post-money.

Moment was unveiled by MultiChoice in May 2023 as a joint venture with payments group Rapyd and venture capital firm General Catalyst, with the pitch that MultiChoice’s own payment flows — then about $3.5-billion a year across 22 million households — would provide the anchor volume for a broader African payments business. It began operating in the second half of that year.

That bet has largely played out as planned. CEO Joel Yarbrough said the company is now “processing for 10 million people a month across some of Africa’s leading brands”. It supports an in-person acceptance network that Moment says spans more than two million physical locations.

“Our platform is highly resilient, and we process 600 000 transactions a day despite power and connectivity problems that plague the market,” Yarbrough said in a statement on Tuesday. “We’ve built a platform that can deliver on the particular challenges of the African market and help businesses get paid faster and at lower cost.”

‘Hidden tax’

Moment’s commercial argument rests on how differently Africans pay. In South Africa, the company said, more than two-thirds of retail transactions are still made in person at physical points of sale despite high bank account penetration. In Nigeria, instant bank transfers dominate but compete with cash, cards and wallets. Elsewhere, mobile money has filled the gap left by low banking penetration but is splintered across dozens of operators, leaving merchants without a single provider able to collect across every channel.

The company sells to billers and enterprise merchants — insurers, subscription platforms and the like — offering recurring payments, customer outreach, failed-payment recovery and direct integration into enterprise billing systems, alongside low-code and no-code tools for smaller merchants.

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Dominique Collett, general partner at AlphaCode Venture Partners, said Africa’s payment complexity “has long been a hidden tax on commerce — on every business trying to grow here, and on every household trying to participate in the digital economy”. She said Moment is “dismantling that barrier in a way we haven’t seen before, at continental scale, compliantly, and with a product that the market’s largest enterprises have already validated”.

Canal+ chief diversification officer Thomas Follin said the group examined Moment closely after taking control of MultiChoice. “Moment has driven down cost and improved quality simultaneously. The business provides world-class technology for enterprise-grade subscription and billing customers that operate in Africa,” he said.

AlphaCode Dominique Collett — AlphaCode’s Dominique Collett

Moment did not disclose a valuation for the round, nor the size of each investor’s holding. MultiChoice held 30.8% of Moment after the May 2024 round, according to MultiChoice’s own disclosures — a stake this round will have diluted further. At that stage, 95% of Moment’s processing volumes came from migrating MultiChoice South Africa and Showmax South Africa onto the platform, making the pay-TV group both Moment’s biggest shareholder and its biggest customer, a dependency that is only now being diluted as third-party enterprise clients come on board.

Moment is headquartered in Cape Town with offices in Dubai, Johannesburg, Lagos, Kigali and London. Its shareholder register now also includes Entree Capital, the Raba Partnership and Helios Investment Partners. — © 2026 NewsCentral Media