Yoco, a South African payments startup, has acquired Nona Digital, a fintech and Web3 software development studio located in Cape Town, in order to accelerate its roadmap by bringing in a team of highly specialised fintech product and technology specialists.
Yoco creates tools and services to assist small companies with accepting credit card payments in-store and online, obtaining loans, and managing their day-to-day operations. Over 150,000 small companies in South Africa have chosen the firm as their preferred payment partner, with the startup handling over $1 billion in card payments each year.
Nona Digital was recently bought by the business, which received US$83 million in Series C investment last July. Nona was founded in 2012 in Cape Town by Mike Scott, Ed O’Reilly, Gordon Angus, and two others with the goal of delivering software products and teams at a level that elevates the industry as a whole. They’ve developed into true financial professionals over the years, with a particular flare for Web3 application development.
Yoco has been a Nona customer since 2019, and the two organisations’ existing ties, institutional expertise, and shared principles ensure the Nona team can hit the ground running and accelerate the Yoco plan right now.
“We are excited to welcome Nona and its team to Yoco. Nona is an industry leader behind some of the best digital banking and Web3 products both in the region and globally. All of this makes them a great fit for the direction we are taking and the evolution of our products. After working with the team for over a year, we realised that the cultural alignment between the two organisations and a shared passion for creating financial products for millions of self-employed Africans made working together with a no brainer,” said Lungisa Matshoba, CTO at Yoco.
Nona’s CEO, Mike Scott, stated that the business has spent the last ten years assembling an extraordinary team and competence in the financial and Web3 sectors.
“This acquisition allows us to direct everything that we have built towards a vision and mission that we believe in, and that matters. It is a natural evolution for a strong services business to move into production and we are very excited to now be part of the Yoco story,” he said.
Yoco aims to be the dominant financial platform for self-employed people in Africa and the Middle East by 2024, with its payments software and capital solutions serving one million entrepreneurs. This form of team acquisition, according to the organisation, is extremely beneficial in today’s environment of high talent demand.
Yoco has purchased Cobi Interactive in 2019 and Dado in 2021, making this the third and largest acquisition of a software development business by the company since 2019. Yoco now has a workforce of 500 individuals, with half of them working on products and technology.
Yoco is expanding its talent presence across Africa, Europe, and the Middle East following its Series C last year.
“We have been bringing in talent aggressively across South Africa and other markets – employing people remotely across 15 geographies and in our talent hubs in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Amsterdam, Cairo and Dubai,” said Matshoba.
