Shola Akinlade (Paystack Co-founder and CEO) announced on Thursday, October 15th that Paystack is joining Stripe. In his words, “We’ll be acquired by Stripe to accelerate online commerce across Africa, pending standard closing conditions including regulatory approvals.”
Stripe is a technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. Companies of all sizes – including Amazon, Google, Shopify, and Zoom – use Stripe’s software to accept payments and scale their online businesses. Each year, more than 80% of American adults complete a purchase using Stripe. This acquisition is the culmination of a close partnership between Stripe and Paystack over the last several years. Both companies are alums of the Y Combinator accelerator program. Stripe led Paystack Series A round of funding in 2018.
Paystack is a technology company powering growth for businesses in Africa through the provision of secure payment tools. Over 60,000 businesses of all sizes use the Paystack suite of Collections, Disbursements, and Identity Verification, Reporting, and Commerce tools to grow their business across the continent, including FedEx, UPS, MTN, the Lagos Internal Revenue Service, and AXA Mansard. Merchants already use Paystack technology to process hundreds of millions of dollars each month. Shola further reiterated that joining forces with Stripe will supercharge their ability to serve their vast community of makers and help more businesses across the continent.
Paystack is PCI DSS Level 1 Certified, the most stringent level of certification in the global payments industry, enabling companies to transact across Africa safely and securely.
However, Akinlade emphasized that Paystack will continue to operate independently, and there will be no disruption of service as a result of this acquisition. He said, “If you’re using Paystack today, there’s no need to change anything about your technical integrations.”
