Moment, a pan-African payments infrastructure startup processing 600,000 transactions daily, has secured $22 million in a Series A funding round, bringing its total raised to $55 million since launching three years ago. The raise comes at a time when venture funding into African startups has contracted from its 2021–2022 peak, making growth-stage rounds in the payments infrastructure space comparatively notable.

The round was led by AlphaCode Venture Partners, with continued participation from existing backers General Catalyst and MultiChoice. New investor Canal+ — the French media conglomerate that completed its acquisition of MultiChoice last year — also joined the round.

Canal+'s involvement marks a notable strategic development. The company now holds a direct financial stake in the payments infrastructure serving its own DStv and streaming subscribers across the continent, reflecting a broader trend of media companies seeking to own the full financial journey of their customers, from content delivery through to payment collection.

CEO Joel Yarbrough said Moment currently serves 10 million people monthly across several of Africa's leading brands, supported by an in-person acceptance network spanning more than two million physical locations. "We process 600,000 transactions a day despite power and connectivity problems that plague the market," he said.

The new capital will be directed toward deepening Moment's network, enhancing its platform capabilities, and accelerating expansion across the continent.

The challenge Moment addresses is one familiar to any business operating across multiple African markets: no single payment method works everywhere. Each region favors different systems. South Africa maintains a highly banked population, yet most transactions still occur in person at physical retail locations. Nigeria relies predominantly on instant bank transfers, while cash, cards, and mobile wallets all remain in widespread use. Across East Africa and Francophone West Africa, mobile money dominates, but it is fragmented among dozens of operators with no single provider connecting them all. This fragmentation has also been a focal point of the African Continental Free Trade Area, which has prioritized cross-border payment interoperability as a prerequisite for expanding intra-African trade.

For businesses collecting payments across three or four African markets simultaneously, this fragmentation creates significant operational complexity, requiring multiple integrations, separate reconciliation processes, and substantial engineering resources merely to accept customer payments.

Moment's proposed solution is a unified platform handling all of these requirements. It offers omni-channel collection tools, embedded financial services, and support for locally preferred payment methods in each market — designed to continue functioning even during power outages or network disruptions.

Since its launch three years ago, Moment has quietly established itself as the infrastructure layer behind some of the continent's best-known brands. The $22 million raise provides the company with additional runway to scale its operations further across Africa.