Now, after conducting 150+ user interviews, processed hundreds of thousands in GMV, and had 15+ companies participate. It’s been busy, stressful, and thrilling. We are live! Our Super-API is here to save businesses across the Middle East & Africa from a complex, costly, and unscalable revenue stack.
And the big news…
We’ve raised a $3m pre-seed extension to make our vision a reality
We’re truly humbled by the trust of our global investors, such as:
Lead investor COTU Ventures. One of the Middle East’s leading seed-stage VC firms, COTU Ventures also led our previous pre-seed round. Amir Farha and Yusuf Saber have been an integral part of the team and their support is what any founder can wish for.
VC investors from around the world such as MENA fintech fund VentureSouq and European fund VentureFriends; repeat investors Kepple Africa Ventures and Lofty Capital Inc; as well as Nuwa Capital, The Continent Venture Partners, First Check Africa, and Fox Ventures.
Angel investors like NerdWallet’s Tim Chen and Jake Gibson, Belvo’s Oriol Tintore, Jad Antoun (Huspy), and Feras Jalbout (Baraka).
Our customers. Hussein Elkheshen, CTO of Sakneen, was moved to invest after seeing how much his company benefitted from our beta.
We’re honored by such a resounding endorsement from our investors and users, and eager to tackle a problem so many businesses face.
The dark side of MEA’s fintech boom
The Middle East and Africa is a hotbed of payment and fintech innovation: over 800 services are tackling everything from compliance to rent payments, with more products launching every year (it’s growing at 30%+ annually. Pretty exciting, right?). This has unlocked countless opportunities for businesses to automate processes and increase offerings - but also significantly increased the complexity they face.
Fragmentation poses a significant challenge in building a payment stack
Between differing regional regulations and the proliferation of single-point solutions, businesses are left to piece together a revenue stack to fit their geography, product, and customer base. Each part of the stack has its own integration and workflow, so the work doesn’t scale and the second integration is as tedious and time-consuming as the tenth. And, of course, a stack isn’t static: it grows and evolves along with the business, requiring a new set of solutions, integrations, and headaches.
Until now, businesses had two options: build their stack in-house, or sign an exclusive (often expensive) contract with a third-party service.
In-house development wastes time and effort
Building a revenue stack in-house allows for flexibility and customization, but even though there’s no line item for a vendor’s fee, the implicit cost is significant. We estimate that it takes around $14,000 in engineering hours and 3-8 calendar weeks to launch a single integration, delaying speed to market, increasing complexity, and pulling engineers off of their core work. That’s before factoring in the cost of maintaining an integration - an estimated $12,000 annually - spent when engineers have to maintain a constantly updating, idiosyncratic integration; and the operations team has to manually reconcile reports from each service with a depressing number of vlookups and transformations. Businesses pour time and money into building their own revenue stack, at the expense of finding optimizations, putting out new offerings, or improving their customer experience.
Third-party contracts are restrictive and limiting
Exclusive third-party contracts would seem to be the solution: instead of building in-house, businesses can sign on with a vendor who will meet some of their current payment needs for them. The problem? It’s only some of their current needs.
Let’s break that down:
Some: While aggregators may be simpler than integrating with each individual provider, they aren’t necessarily comprehensive, either. A service that accepts your customers’ top five payment methods may lack customizable checkout forms or optimal security measures; a service that covers the five countries on your roadmap may not cover all payment methods within those countries. You’ll save on in-house development costs, but you may be missing out on features that would greatly benefit your bottom line.
Current: Vendors are meant to serve your business at that point in time. As you grow, you’ll have to navigate new compliance concerns, customer needs, and product lines, increasing delays and friction. And if you eventually decide your vendor isn’t meeting your needs, you’ll end up right where you were: having to build it all in-house.
Businesses deserve better. Something that’s easy to install, but robust enough to handle the complex, constantly evolving revenue landscape. Something that understands local payment methods and currencies, but serves a wide swath of geographies. Something with superpowers.
Today, we’re launching the MoneyHash Super-API to power your revenue stack
Let’s face it: your business probably has more APIs than it can handle. That’s why we’re offering a Super-API: one integration point for all your payment and revenue needs. Here’s how it works:
Choose your providers. Find your existing provider among our 70+
pay-in, pay-out, and value-add providers, or choose the ones that best serve you and your customers. You know your business best - we’re here to support you, not restrict what providers you’re allowed to use.
Select your micro-services.We’re more than a payment aggregator: we provide micro-services ranging from transaction routing, to promo codes, to subscriptions. We’ve made building an end-to-end revenue stack as simple as stacking one brick on top of another.
Integrate once. With our straightforward API and extensive documentation, you’ll be up and running in no time. Whether you’ll use the time you save to launch a new feature, finally get around to that refactor, or take a well-deserved break is up to you.
Discover new opportunities. We take our job as an end-to-end service seriously. We don’t just save you time and headaches upfront - we continually search for ways to make your life easier. Smart routing rules reduce per-transaction costs and increase success rates; centralized reporting makes it easier for your team to surface key insights.
Watch your stack evolve along with your business. When you’re ready to expand into a new market, launch a new product line, or expand your customer base, simply add the services and providers you need with just a few clicks. No restrictive contracts, no tech debt, and no hassle.
Core principles
Features and roadmaps change, but our core product principles remain the same:
We make your life easier. Are you an engineer who absolutely loves building payment products from scratch? Great,
come work for us! But if you’d rather be building your company’s core product, let us take care of the hassle so you can focus on growing your business.
Every business is different, and every business evolves. The payments landscape is overwhelming, and it’s all too easy to sign up for a service or provider that turns out to be expensive, unnecessary, or inferior. Whether you’re an e-commerce business, a fintech service, or an e-commerce business that became a fintech service, we give you the flexibility to experiment, grow, and change.
By developers, for not-just-developers. We’re here because we’re frustrated by how an inefficient, confusing, and fragmented fintech landscape hinders business growth. Our team is laser-focused on building robust underlying technology that’s reliable, extensible, easy to use, and future-proof. It’s our superpower.
Case studies
“Wix of the Middle East” streamlines payment services across MENA
Wuilt, a website and e-store builder, is known as the Wix of the Middle East. Because they serve merchants across MENA, each incremental market meant integrating with a new set of payment providers and incorporating those integrations into the merchant onboarding flow. Their in-house payment stack might have worked for one or two countries, but it now hindered their expansion plans.
Instead of wasting more engineering hours to tack on more providers, Wuilt integrated with MoneyHash in just a few days. With the MoneyHash Super-API, Wuilt has streamlined its payment services across countries, saving their team almost one full year of development time (!!) and streamlining their merchant onboarding process.
YC-backed marketplace uses micro-services to build a robust payment stack
Sakneen (Y Combinator W21) connects Egyptian landlords and renters through a real estate marketplace. They use Stripe’s subscription models in order to process recurring payments, but in order to serve their customer base, they need to connect with local payment providers as well. They had a dilemma: use Stripe exclusively, and alienate their customer base; or integrate with multiple providers, requiring weeks of engineering time and distracting the team from their core product.
Sakneen chose a third option, partnering with MoneyHash to power their pay-in, pay-out, and subscription services, all in one place. Now, they’re able to serve their customers, keep their engineers focused on the product, and look towards a future where they can partner with banks and mortgage providers with minimal engineering effort.
“When I first heard of MoneyHash, I was very excited by the idea. I saw huge potential in having an aggregator for all different payment gateways, which would both reduce engineering time and increase visibility on transactions. Sakneen saw these benefits firsthand when we enrolled in the MoneyHash private beta, and I believe that their tools will continue to help us scale and expand in the future.”\ - Hussein Elkheshen, CTO of Sakneen
What’s next
We’re honored by the trust of our investors, customers, and customers who became investors. Now that we’ve launched, we plan to:
Expand our footprint. We’re here to serve the Middle East & Africa, so we’re consistently adding new providers and services that work for each region.
Add more micro-services. KYC, loyalty programs, accounting support, and more are all coming soon.
Hire top talent. We’re as passionate about building a great team as we are about building a great product, and are looking for smart, humble, eager-to-learn people to join our remote-first team. See our open positions.
Our launch is just the start of our journey to revolutionize the fintech landscape across MEA.
Want a smart, simple, scaleable revenue stack?
Moneyhash is your go-to solution.
