Black Owned Klasha gets $2.4M To Improve Cross-Border Commerce In Africa

Klasha, a Lagos and San Francisco-based startup that provides multiple integrations and APIs to facilitate transactions, has raised $2.4 million in seed to scale.

Jessica Anuna first founded Klasha in 2018. At the time, the company’s focus was to make it easier for African consumers to purchase products directly from global fashion retailers.

Now it has several features and a new business model centered around helping Africans make payments and get the goods they want, regardless of their location, reported TechCrunch.

Klasha Checkout also allows international merchants to collect payments from Africa in local currencies and it uses what Africans are accustomed to — bank account, card, USSD, M-Pesa, and mobile money. 

The checkout solution can be integrated into any e-commerce platform, the company told TechCrunch. It also has plugins for big-name e-commerce sites WooCommerce, OpenCart, and BigCommerce and is set to sign an official partnership with BigCommerce, extending its reach to more merchants globally.

With KlashaWire, consumers can pay with African currencies: naira, cedis, shillings — via multiple payments methods, which Klasha then remits to merchants in dominant currencies like the U.S. dollar or euros in two business days.

Ms. Anuna told Tech Crunch that “a lot of our merchants have said to us, if we’re going to be able to accept payments from Africa, we need a way to seamlessly ship to Africa in a short amount of time and provide the best end to end logistics experience for our consumers. And that’s what we’ve done,”