The round marks a significant milestone in the company’s mission to transform how financial institutions serve small and mid-sized businesses across the continent.

littlefish’s platform sits at the intersection of banking infrastructure and commerce enablement. Its commerce layer consolidates point-of-sale applications, back-office CRMs, merchant portals, payments, and APIs into a unified orchestration layer that integrates directly into POS devices and core banking systems.

Serving tier 1 financial institutions as clients, including Standard Bank, First National Bank (FNB), and Absa, littlefish enables banks to offer fintech-grade merchant services at scale while preserving ownership of the merchant relationship.

The company also has a key partnership with Visa, which has embedded littlefish’s platform into the card payment institution’s small business onboarding strategy.

Littlefish’s monthly recurring revenue has grown 30x since its seed round.

“This raise is a validation of our belief that the best way to serve Africa’s small businesses is to work with the institutions they already trust, not around them,” said Brandon Roberts, Co-Founder and CEO of littlefish. “We’ve proven the model in South Africa, and this capital gives us the runway to deepen those relationships and bring what we’ve built to millions more merchants across the continent. The little guys deserve world-class financial infrastructure, too, and we’re building it.”

With the new capital, littlefish is significantly growing its team, accelerating product development, and scaling its go-to-market operations.

The company will deepen its relationships with existing South African banking clients and merchants while expanding its footprint to more than 10 additional African markets, including Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia.

“littlefish has done something rare: it has built indispensable infrastructure and convinced Africa’s most powerful financial institutions to stake their merchant businesses on it,” said Matthieu Marchand, principal at Partech. “With the deep trust littlefish has already established in South Africa and a clear path to expansion across more than 10 markets, we believe the company is positioned to become the defining merchant infrastructure layer for the continent. We’re proud to lead this round and support the team as they scale.”

“When we backed littlefish at the seed stage, we believed in the team’s vision for what bank-embedded merchant infrastructure could become in South Africa and other emerging markets,” said Ameya Upadhyay, general partner at Flourish Ventures. “Since then, they’ve built deliberately, earned the trust of the largest institutions on the continent, and created a platform that banks need. Participating in this Series A round was an easy decision. littlefish’s traction speaks for itself, and we’re excited to see what comes next.”

With its most recent investment in TurnStay, the South African travel payment platform, which has just closed a $2M seed round, TAPSI has now deployed 50% of its capital.

TAPSI was launched in 2022 to extend TLcom’s investment reach to pre-seed stage companies, providing up to $200,000 in funding alongside access to the firm’s global network, operational expertise, and over two decades of experience in African venture investing.

The fund acts as an upstream feeder vehicle for TLcom’s core $154M TIDE Africa Fund II, enabling portfolio companies that perform well to progress to larger funding rounds.

In addition to Turnstay, the TAPSI portfolio currently includes Talstack [Nigeria], Bright Financial [Sudan and Ethiopia], Tradehub [Egypt], Agrails [Kenya] and three startups backed through its partnership with First Check Africa, which focuses on delivering early-stage capital to female founders.

Through TAPSI, TLcom expects to close on up to ten additional pre-seed investments before the end of 2026 and will continue to invest in diverse founding teams across Africa’s major innovation hubs.

Building on the investment approach of TLcom’s TIDE Fund I and TIDE Fund II, TAPSI is sector-agnostic and focuses on key sectors where TLcom sees strong early-stage potential for outsized impact.

Talstack’s journey demonstrates this approach in practice, leveraging its TAPSI pre-seed funding to validate its model and achieve early traction, culminating in a subsequent seed round from TIDE Fund II in 2024.

This dedicated pre-seed fund strengthens TLcom’s position as a multi-stage investor, reflecting the firm’s deep understanding of the funding lifecycle of the African tech ecosystem and the critical role early capital plays in setting African startups on a path to scale and create impact.

Eloho Omame, partner at TLcom Capital, says,

“Pre-seed investments allow us to expand our portfolio and allocate capital across multiple stages of a company’s lifecycle. Our goal is to create massive value in underserved markets and collaborate with African founders to build from the start all the way to exit; be it an acquisition or in the form of an IPO. This is by no means easy for any start-up, in any sector; building in Africa is not for the faint-hearted. However, the likelihood of success significantly increases if we support and work with founders earlier on in their journeys and we grow alongside them”.

TLcom boasts one of African tech’s most impressive early-stage portfolios, including Pula, uLesson, Autochek, FairMoney, Educatly, HUB2, ILLA, Littlefish, Seamless HR, and Andela – one of the continent’s tech unicorns.

With approximately $250 million under management, including the $154M TIDE Africa II, TLcom is dedicated to empowering ambitious entrepreneurs who are solving critical challenges in large, underserved markets.

Eloho Omame concludes,

“With TAPSI as a dedicated pre-seed arm of our investment platform, TLcom is uniquely positioned to back companies across their entire growth journey from ideation and product-market fit to scaling and maturity, reinforcing our role as a long-term partner to Africa’s most ambitious founders. As we progress with this fund, we look forward to speaking with and supporting more early-stage start-ups from across the continent”.