Talk360, a South African startup has closed a US$4 million seed funding round led by HAVAIC, a venture capital and advisory firm based in Cape Town, South Africa. Other investors include Gaston Aussems (ex-Mollie), Robert Kraal (ex-Adyen), Gabriel de Montessuss (President WorldPay International) and Marnix van der Ploeg (ex-Booking.com and EQT).
Talk360 offers an international calling app that allows reliable and affordable phone calls to any offline landline or mobile phone in the world. It is a simple app that helps people call their friends, reach out to their family, and speak with their loved ones over the phone. Only the initiator of the call needs a smartphone, the calling app and internet to make calls.
But besides this, the company is on a mission to solve a huge friction in African markets. Talk360 is working to create a new payment platform that will integrate all available payment options across Africa. This will trim the number of service providers that companies operating in Africa will onboard to cater for the unique preferences emanating from the continent’s diversity.
According to Talk360, the product will open up businesses to the largest pool of localized payment options in Africa. The company plans to use the newly raised fund to expand its call business across the African continent.
With existing partnerships with agents like PesaPoint in Kenya and Flash in South Africa, Talk360 enables users to purchase airtime vouchers from a network of over 750,000 physical points of sale. South Africa, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh are among its biggest markets. Talk360 co-founder and managing director for Africa Dean Hiine told TechCrunch he anticipates great growth for its payment platform, which he says will also make it easy for international merchants to sell to users in Africa too. He added that the startup decided to build its own payment platform informed by the need to make payment and checkout easy for its users in Africa.
According to Hiine, the plan is to integrate different payment systems. He says his new platform will bring all the “scattered payment methods” across Africa on a common platform, which he believes will positively impact Talk360’s bottom line, and that of other merchants that will use its platform.
“In our calling business we identified some unique problems around digital payment in Africa. The payment methods are scattered and payment processes are lengthy…And we could see that this problem had a serious impact on our bottom line in terms of conversion rate we were seeing in Africa…It is a problem we experienced and we are trying to solve for other merchants with a presence in the continent too by making the process fast and easy,” said Hiine.
“We are building the platform to actually increase our conversion rate by giving the user experience one single checkout, and to some level, offer predictive analysis– to tell the preferred methods of payment for that region and offer them as top options for the user,” said Hiine.
Since it was co-founded in 2016 by Hiine, Hans Osnabrugge, and Jorne Schamp, Talk360 has grown to be in use in 170 countries, connecting 2 million people in 2021. The current model, which was born from the need to compete with internet calls powered by social media platforms such as WhatsApp, has seen Talk360 pitching its tent in many markets across the globe. This means, setting up a hub in markets in East and South Africa.