littlefish raises $9.5 million to scale its merchant operating system across Africa

littlefish, the South African startup building financial infrastructure for small businesses, has raised a $9.5 million Series A round to scale its merchant operating system and expand across Africa.

This raise adds to a growing pattern in Africa’s fintech ecosystem, where startups are choosing to build infrastructure for financial institutions rather than compete with them directly. While it is still early, littlefish’s scale with local Tier I banks, and ongoing investor interest in its model, suggest demand for infrastructure that helps financial institutions serve small businesses.

“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.”

Founded in Johannesburg in 2021, littlefish is positioning itself as a foundational layer for how financial institutions serve small businesses. It combines point-of-sale applications, back-office Customer Relationship Management (CRM), merchant portals, payments, and Application Programming Interface (API) into a unified layer that allows merchants to run their businesses without switching between multiple systems.

Small businesses in South Africa and across the continent typically run their operations on a patchwork of disconnected tools: a point-of-sale system here, a bank account there, an Excel spreadsheet for inventory, a separate accounting package. That fragmentation is both operationally inefficient and increasingly a security liability; a South African study found that over 70% of SMEs have experienced at least one attempted cyberattack.

“Whether you’re using online store tools, e-commerce tools, in-store tools, a book and a pen, an Excel spreadsheet, a bank account, a wallet, or an accounting package, these are all the things you’re expected to use nowadays,” Roberts said.

Rather than going directly to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), littlefish works through financial institutions, offering its platform as a white-labelled software-as-a-service (SaaS) product. This allows financial institutions to deliver merchant services while maintaining ownership of the customer relationship.

“The biggest problem we were going to solve is helping merchants,” said Neha Kumar, co-founder of littlefish. “I think 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.”

Global tech investment firm Partech led the round with participation from Proparco and returning backers such as TLcom Capital and Flourish Ventures. It comes a year after the company closed its seed investment round, which saw participation from the same core investors. 

The new capital will be used to grow its team, accelerate product development, and deepen its footprint in South Africa, where it already works with Standard Bank, First National Bank, and Absa. littlefish will also use the funding to expand into more than ten African markets, including Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, alongside its existing financial institution partners.

“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,” said Brandon Roberts, co-founder and CEO of littlefish. “The little guys deserve world-class financial infrastructure, too, and we’re building it.”

This approach also shapes how littlefish approaches competition. Instead of positioning itself against fintechs or banks, the company sees itself as an enabling layer across both players. 

“Our fundamental role is to play more of a connector and an enabler,” Kumar said. “The approach we take is not to say what slice of the pie we are trying to keep for ourselves, but rather what allows us to provide this connected, interoperable system for merchants.”