Open finance continues to be a significant theme in the world of fintech as businesses tap APIs to access customers’ financial accounts and provide a gamut of integrated and embedded financial services. In the latest development, Stitch — one of the prominent players building and operating these APIs in Africa — confirmed to TechCrunch that it has raised $21 million in Series A funding.
This news follows the $4 million Stitch raised out of stealth in February 2021, a prequel to the $2 million extensions round it secured four months ago, bringing its seed round to $6 million. In total, Stitch has raised $27 million to date.
The South African API fintech enables businesses to build, optimize, and scale financial products. Per a statement released by the company, it plans to create a “financial graph” ecosystem across Africa with the new funding.
The company describes the financial graph as an infrastructure for financial building blocks that allow businesses to write code once, launch in multiple markets and scale faster based on interoperability across regions, providers, banks, and other types of financial accounts.
“We sort of view the broader financial ecosystem as a bunch of different nodes–bank accounts, merchants such as fintech or end-users–which are all intrinsically connected,” Stitch CEO Kiaan Pillay said to TechCrunch in an interview. “Often, we think about the fact that these connections between geographies and institutions don’t exist yet. And a lot of what we try to do is to bridge those connections and to make those connections ubiquitous.”
