South African startup Littlefish is building a financial infrastructure for small businesses, has raised $9.5 million in a Series A round to scale its merchant operating system and expand across Africa. The raise reflects a growing trend in the continent’s fintech ecosystem, where startups increasingly focus on building infrastructure for financial institutions rather than competing with them directly.
Founded in Johannesburg in 2021, littlefish positions itself as a foundational layer for how financial institutions serve small businesses. Its platform combines point-of-sale applications, back-office CRM, merchant portals, payments, and APIs into a unified system that allows merchants to run their operations without switching between multiple tools. Across the continent, SMEs often operate with a patchwork of disconnected systems like POS apps, bank accounts, spreadsheets, and accounting software which can be inefficient and create security vulnerabilities.
Rather than selling directly to merchants, littlefish partners with banks, offering its platform as a white-labelled SaaS product. This approach lets financial institutions maintain ownership of customer relationships while delivering robust merchant services. “The biggest problem we were going to solve is helping merchants,” said co-founder Neha Kumar. “We can do it in a more scalable and impactful manner through the market approach we’ve taken, which is to go through the financial institutions.”
The Series A round was led by Partech, with participation from Proparco and returning investors TLcom Capital and Flourish Ventures. Matthieu Marchand, Principal at Partech, highlighted littlefish’s traction with Tier I banks and its potential across more than 10 African markets. “littlefish has built indispensable infrastructure and convinced Africa’s most powerful financial institutions to stake their merchant businesses on it,” he said.
The new funding will allow littlefish to grow its team, accelerate product development, deepen its footprint in South Africa with partners such as Standard Bank, FNB, and Absa, and expand into markets including Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia. CEO Brandon Roberts emphasized that the company’s goal is to deliver world-class financial infrastructure to small businesses across the continent: “We’ve proven the model in South Africa, and this capital gives us the runway to bring what we’ve built to millions more merchants.”
By positioning itself as an enabler rather than a direct competitor to fintechs or banks, littlefish aims to provide a connected, interoperable system for merchants. “Our role is to be a connector and an enabler,” Kumar said. “We’re focused not on what slice of the pie we keep for ourselves, but on creating a system that allows merchants to operate seamlessly.”