When merchants or companies launch online, they typically start by partnering with one or two payment processors. But as they grow and expand into new regions, they often need to onboard additional payment partners to meet different customer (and sometimes regulatory) needs, a process that comes with some hurdles.
That’s given rise to companies to help manage the process. Egypt’s MoneyHash — which helps merchants across the Middle East and Africa manage complex payment stacks more easily — has raised $5.2 million as it scales to target larger enterprises. The pre-Series A comes around a year after its last funding, when it announced a $4.5 million seed round in February 2024. In total, MoneyHash has raised over $12 million since Nader Abdelrazik and Mustafa Eid launched the Egyptian fintech in early 2021.
The area that MoneyHash works in is classically described as “payment orchestration,” and in the fragmented world of payments — where a business might work with dozens of different providers to take, make, and bank payments — its star has risen with the growth of online transactions. Integrating multiple payment stacks can be operationally inefficient and technically complex, often taking in-house tech teams weeks to complete. These challenges are even more apparent across Africa and the Middle East due to the various payment methods and currencies. This is where payment orchestration platforms come in by aggregating and simplifying these payment processes across regions via APIs.
Abdelrazik and Eid founded MoneyHash after years of working in fintech and enterprise software and witnessing firsthand some of the problems. Put simply, payments are (perhaps obviously) the crux of how a business operates, grows, and makes a profit. But too often there were instead costly and risky bottlenecks, especially for smaller merchants: Payment failure rates in the region are three times the global average and cart abandonment is more than 20% higher than in developed markets. They saw orchestration as the solution: By their thinking, merchants without payment orchestration platforms are at the mercy of high operational costs and revenue leakage, and will find it hard to scale across regions.
“The opportunity to solve this is immense,” said CEO Abdelrazik. “In emerging markets, digital payments represent only a fraction of total transaction volume, suggesting massive growth potential in the coming decade. We’ve built MoneyHash specifically to help merchants overcome these complex challenges and turn payments from a liability into a strategic advantage.”
MoneyHash integrates with a merchant’s payment providers to give its customers a simplified way of working across that stack. It offers features like a unified API for pay-in and pay-out operations, customizable checkout, advanced transaction routing with fraud prevention, failure rate optimization, and detailed reporting tools. The company also supports recurring payments, virtual wallets, subscription management, and payment links, delivering an “all-in-one solution” for merchants, it said.
Just as you have a16z-backed Payrails, Spreedly, Zooz, and Primer in the U.S., U.K., and Europe, MoneyHash serves customers across the Middle East and Africa. Abdelrazik said that’s what sets MoneyHash apart: its focus on emerging markets and its vast integration network, which includes over 300 pre-integrated APIs (with local and international processors and gateways like Adyen, Amazon Pay, Checkout, Fawry, Mono, Stripe, Tabby, and ValU) covering 100+ markets. QED-backed Precium (formerly Revio), a South African upstart, provides similar services in the region.
MoneyHash initially focused on small merchants but began targeting larger enterprises in early 2024 with the launch of its enterprise suite, a move that has allowed the company to achieve notable scale.
“Without us, you can still do a lot of performance enhancements that will take years of work and studying. But when you add our software, all performance metrics across the payment get to the highest level possible. We’re talking about the authorization, conversion, and fraud rates. And we’re pretty comprehensive,” remarked CEO Abdelrazik.
“We’re not focusing on only one performance metric to try to fix all the problems across the entire payment chain life cycle, which is what enterprises need. Enterprise doesn’t want to solve one problem. They’ll search for other problems. They want a comprehensive solution across the payment cycle, and that’s what we do.”
Enterprises across industries like consumer fintech, hospitality, e-commerce, and gaming now make up 35% of MoneyHash’s clientele, a threefold increase in 2024. Key customers include BNPL unicorn Tamara, cloud kitchen leader Kitopi, and e-commerce platform Brands For Less.
According to the head of payments at Tamara, MoneyHash stands out in the region by “building an important point of difference,” likely referring to its claims to help clients achieve a 10-20% increase in revenue generation while cutting go-to-market and development costs by 90%.
Meanwhile, Abdelrazik credits his startup’s enterprise pipeline and long-term contracts helped in raising the pre-Series A funding. He said these customers fueled a 4x increase in processing volume and a 3x revenue increase over the past year, though specific figures remain undisclosed.
Global fintech investor Flourish Ventures led the round. Other investors include Saudi’s Vision Ventures, Arab Bank’s Xelerate, and Emurgo Kepple Ventures. The round also welcomed participation from Jason Gardner, founder and former CEO of Marqeta (his first check in the region), and existing investors GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner and COTU Ventures.
