ADDIS ABABA (Paga) – Lagos-based digital payments company Paga has completed the acquisition of Apposit LLC, a software development company specialized in building software to power innovative and high impact businesses in Africa.
Paga, a Nigerian digital payments company, has completed the acquisition of Apposit LLC, a US-based Ethiopia-centered software development company specialized in building software to power innovative and high impact businesses in Africa.
In 2018, when announcing a $10million raised in growth financing, Paga shared that it had begun exploring opportunities in other economies, similar to Nigeria, to build a global emerging markets powerhouse. In line with this, the Lagos-headquartered company acquired one of it strategic partners — Apposit LLC, a US software company with primary operations in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Paga’s relationship with Apposit is not new – that Apposit LLC has always had an engineering team dedicated to Paga since 2009, led by Eric Chijioke, who is Paga’s Chief Technology Officer.
Paga’s founder and CEO, Tayo Oviosu, said: “Our favorite motto at Paga is that we go farther together as a team, and this is exemplified in our decision to take our trusted business relationship with Apposit one step further and have them fully become a part of the Paga family. By doing so, we not only gain a scalable world-class internal engineering team, but we also are in a stronger position to grow our global payments business. Last year we refined our mission and vision to birth our massive transformative purpose: To make it simple for one billion people to access and use money. Apposit has demonstrated strong alignment with our purpose and they have some of the very best engineers I have been privileged to work with, in over two decades in technology in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. I am very excited to have Apposit join the Paga team.”
Paga’s global mission led the startup company to pinpoint Ethiopia as one of the viable countries with similar cash and payment problems identified in Nigeria and to introduce Paga services to the market. Acquiring Apposit LLC provides Paga with an instant go-to-market strategy to launch the Paga service in Ethiopia under the vast experience and leadership of Adam Abate, Apposit’s co-founder and CEO, who will now become the CEO of Paga Ethiopia. In addition, Paga now owns Apposit’s other in-house technology products, Terra and Tangio.
Terra is a digital agricultural platform that provides products & tools to collect, manage and analyze data in agricultural value chains. The Terra platform harnesses the power of data to improve decision making in agriculture.
Tangio is a sales force automation platform for manufacturers and distributors of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG). It provides companies the tools and intelligence to plan and execute their route to market strategies.
Apposit LLC’s CEO, Adam Abate, said: “The acquisition of Apposit by Paga is a very natural progression in the close relationship we have enjoyed with Paga over the last 10 years. We are excited to join forces with Paga at a time where Ethiopia embarks in earnest on its digital transformation. As one company we will solve the use of cash and bring access to finance to millions of people in Ethiopia and beyond. Our companies are strongly aligned in terms of values, culture, and purpose, and leveraging Paga’s vast experience and robust payments platform will position us for success. We also look forward to strengthening Paga’s product team and continuing to build technology that will be used globally.”
The leadership team at Apposit LLC will be absorbed into the leadership structure at Paga, retaining Eric Chijoke as the Chief Technology Officer responsible for product development, Simon Solomon becoming the Lead Systems Architect, and Gideon Abate as the Head of Product Innovation. The 62 team members of Apposit LLC will now join the rest of the Paga organization bringing the total staff strength of Paga to over 530 people. With this acquisition, Paga is now poised to build a global product development organization with teams based in Lagos, Addis Ababa, London, and Mexico City.
Acquiring Apposit LLC will allow Paga to achieve its goal to grow around the world quicker. The company was advised on the investment round by London-based global law firm Norton Rose Fulbright LLP (Partner Bayo Odubeko and Senior Associate Nari Ertem).
Source: Paga