Quick snippets from our morning read on Thursday, 18th February 2021
Today’s morning read is a story about Yoco, an African technology company that builds tools and services to help small businesses get paid, run their businesses better and grow. It is a long but very insightful article.
From Scrappy Start-up To Proffesional Contender
When Yoco went live with its card machines in 2015, it wasn’t just a late entry to market, it was a full nine months behind many other entries. The founders weren’t worried. They had a very specific business model and weren’t going to let a noisy market distract them from their vision.
In fact, instead of rushing, they spent the next year growing the business to 500 happy merchants. They were late to market, but getting the model right was more important than being fast.
Since late 2016, the team has closed Series A and Series B rounds of funding, totalling close to R300 million. Slow and steady has worked. That doesn’t mean raising capital was easy, just ultimately successful. Here’s how Yoco did it.
Starting with Angels
“In a strange way, we were lucky that we didn’t receive venture capital funds early on,” says Katlego Maphai, founder and CEO.
We had a funder pull out at the last minute, which was scary, but also a blessing in disguise. It meant we had only angel investors and family offices invested in the business, which gave us the capacity to think long term and not take shortcuts.
We’ve since realised the importance of only taking on VC investment at the last possible moment. It’s imperative to have product/market fit before you chat to VCs, and we only really achieved that at the end of 2016.”
The team learnt this lesson in hindsight though, and like so many start-ups, did approach VCs too early. “We tried to raise VC in early 2015 when we started our beta programme,” recalls Katlego. “In our minds, we’d been running the company for two years.
We thought we had two years’ worth of traction. When we started talking to investors though, the conversations didn’t go as expected. As far as they were concerned, we’d only been operating for two months, and the valuation we were asking for just didn’t make sense.”
Two years later, Yoco was in a completely different position. “From the beginning, we recognised that although tech is important, our business model would differentiate us. We needed to be fast, cheap, use digital channels to onboard clients and aggregate our merchants so that our banking partner has only one point of contact — us. This was what we were quietly investing into, removing friction for merchants who were onboarding themselves onto our platform.
Teams and ecosystems
In the two years preceding Yoco’s official launch, the founding team, Katlego Maphai, Carl Wazen, Bradley Wattrus and Lungisa Matshoba, didn’t just research the technology to make card payments possible for merchants in the informal, rural and SME sectors, but were working on a business model that could achieve their business vision at scale.
“We were a multi-disciplinary team that had come together wanting to make a real entrepreneurial play,” says Katlego, who brought the team together. Having grown up with Lungisa, Katlego met Carl while working for a telecoms advisory and investment firm in Dubai, and Bradley at an incubator for online businesses in Cape Town that hired ex-management consultants to assist start-ups.
By 2012, all four partners were living in Cape Town and had savings they could live off while they planned their entrepreneurial play. “We kept coming back to the payment space. I’d seen Square, a mobile point of sale system, in action in San Francisco in early 2011, and experienced a small restaurant business that would have been cash-based accepting cards.
We knew how underserviced SMEs were in South Africa, and that card payments presented opportunities to support them. We also knew we could build a suite of services to help our micro and SME clients run and grow their businesses once they were on our platform.”
Securing funding
The fact that Yoco’s founding team had four members with varied and successful backgrounds dramatically increased the business’s chances of securing funding, but they still needed to learn some lessons. “In mid-2016 we went on our Series A road show, and it was a choppy start.
First, we realised that we were thinking globally, and those were the conversations we were having, which didn’t match up with the conversations local VCs were having with us. You need to all be on the same page, and we weren’t.”
Once the team realised this key point, they started looking at international investors, but things still weren’t going smoothly. “We started recognising that part of the problem was the way we were approaching the whole funding process,” says Katlego.
“We’d just had an investor meeting that didn’t go well, and we weren’t feeling good. We knew we needed funding — our runway was almost out and our current funding model wasn’t sustainable.
“Instead of focusing on investors, we looked at ourselves. What were our objectives? What were we looking for? We ended up with six key objectives.”
It was a powerful exercise. From that moment onwards, the team walked into meetings knowing what they wanted, which in many ways levelled the playing field. “We had more confidence and we asked more questions, which lead to richer discussions with potential investors. We could also walk away if we saw a key objective wouldn’t be met, which saved everyone time.”
Through this process, Yoco secured Series A funding from Velocity Capital in the Netherlands and US-based Quona Capital for $3 million in new capital and a further $1 million in secondary buyouts, allowing some early angel investors to exit.
Understanding your pitch
Yoco raised $16 million in its Series B fund, which closed in 2018, and although it was the same process, the focus of the pitch was very different. “Series A is often about survival. Series B is about how big this thing can become.
“During our Series A roadshow, a big part of our pitch was proving that there’s a market for people who want to accept cards, and that there was a new way to reach this market that is not people intensive.
“In the Series B round, we could show that we’d been able to grow our base to three times its size with continued good economics and a healthy, good payback. We also showed that the market is ready to be taken with the right type of capital.
“The message was simple: We’ve figured it out and we think we can win with additional capital. There’s a huge opportunity to build an entire SME operating system, bringing payments, software and capital into one home that can essentially look after a small business and build an ecosystem around them. This in turn allows third parties access to our distribution network.
Read the full story about Yoco here.
And as always, if you enjoyed this, check out the rest of our daily snippets, curated daily, right here on The Red Notebook.
