Bizao | Payment hub in Africa
Financial ServicesAbidjan, Ivory Coast11-50 Employees
Important update: Bizao has ceased all operations in France and Africa Bizao was a FinTECH company headquartered in Paris, operating in around ten African countries. We had a human-sized team of approximately sixty people spread across our offices in Paris, Abidjan, Dakar, Douala, and Tunis. Our mission was to support local and international companies in accelerating their growth through the digitalization of payments. Since 2019, Bizao signed more than 30 partnerships with telecom operators, banks, and mobile money operators across Africa. This coverage enabled us to build Africa’s only payment hub, allowing businesses to accept card payments, mobile money, and airtime credit as payment methods. Already covering 200 million end customers, Bizao supported several hundred companies in digitizing their online and in-store payment flows. To ensure end-to-end transaction traceability, our platform—processing up to 350 million requests per month—met the increasing requirements of banks and regulators in terms of anti-terrorism financing and anti-money laundering compliance, thanks to the rigorous compliance frameworks we put in place. To successfully address the many challenges we faced, our company was built around five core values: boldness, kindness, diversity, social commitment, and excellence. We were supported in the development of our company with €8 million in funding from the following investors: AfricInvest, Adelie, and Seedstars Africa Ventures. These investors chose not to reinvest in the company in early 2025, which led our CEO to file for bankruptcy.