Thepeer, an African tech infrastructure startup connecting businesses’ wallets, has raised a $2.1 million seed round led by the Raba Partnership. The news comes a year after the startup raised $220,000 in pre-seed from a handful of angel investors, including Paystack CTO Ezra Olubi and Edenlife CTO Prosper Otemuyiwa.

Participating investors in Thepeer’s seed round include Rali_cap Ventures, Timon Capital, BYLD Ventures, Musha Ventures, Sunu and Uncovered Fund. African fintechs Chipper Cash and Stitch invested too.

Thepeer isn’t a pure fintech play; it sits at the intersection of data and finance. However, the problems Kosisochukwu Chike Ononye and Michael 'Trojan' Okoh wanted to solve when they first launched the company in August 2021 affected fintechs more than any other segment. Like other API-based startups, Thepeer powers infrastructure for mainly fintech businesses, from small to medium-sized.

Last year, the number of African fintechs increased 17.3% to 573, from 491 in 2019, according to local publication Disrupt Africa. Most of these fintechs cater to businesses and consumers, offering different services such as payments, neobanking, lending, investing and trading. While they provide digital wallets to help facilitate money transfers, there’s a lack of mobile wallet interoperability outside their ecosystem; in essence, moving money from one fintech wallet to another fintech or non-fintech wallet (in the case of an embedded finance play) is hard.

Thepeer says its APIs provide an alternative network where fintechs and businesses can embed different sets of products into their applications and websites for easy money movement by their customers.

Send, the offering it launched with, allows customers of businesses who integrate with its APIs, such as Eversend (a cross-border fintech) and Nguvu Health (a teletherapy platform), to send money across both platforms using identifiers such as emails or usernames.

“I made a purchase from a vendor and couldn’t pay after using several apps and couldn’t move money from one wallet where I had cash to another,” said CEO Ononye, narrating why he and CTO Okoh started the company, to TechCrunch in an interview. “After we launched our first product [Send], we went back to the drawing board because there were things we needed to get right. In that process, we discovered more consumer and business problems.”