littlefish, a South African fintech that provides banks with a platform for serving small merchants, announced a $9.5m Series A on 24 March 2026. Partech led the round. TLcom Capital, Flourish Ventures and Proparco also took part, according to Partech's announcement, Ecofin Agency and Daba Finance.
The announcement did not give a valuation. The sources opened for this article gave no amount for the company's earlier seed round, in which Flourish Ventures took part.
“We've proven the model in South Africa.”Brandon Roberts, Co-Founder and CEO, littlefish
What littlefish does
Partech's announcement described the product as a merchant platform for banks. Its commerce layer brings together point-of-sale apps, back-office customer management tools, merchant portals, payments and APIs. It connects to point-of-sale devices and core banking systems, and it lets banks keep ownership of their relationship with the merchant.
Ecofin Agency described a unified platform that combines payment terminals, point-of-sale apps, management systems and merchant portals so that banks can offer merchant services to small and medium-sized businesses.
Daba Finance, writing for AllAfrica, called it a merchant operating system that gives banks one infrastructure layer for payments, point-of-sale, customer management and APIs. Its list of target markets was shorter than Partech's, naming Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.
Customers and growth
Standard Bank, First National Bank (FNB) and Absa are named as clients. Partech said Visa has embedded littlefish's platform in its small business onboarding strategy.
The company said its monthly recurring revenue has grown thirtyfold since the seed round. That figure comes from the announcement and was not independently checked. Chief executive Brandon Roberts said: "We've proven the model in South Africa."
Partech marked the announcement on X with the line: "A big day for the connective tissue that keeps Africa's merchant economy moving!" The post came from the firm's official account and was not attributed to an individual.
Founders and company
Ecofin Agency gave Johannesburg as the company's base and 2021 as the year it was founded. Roberts is co-founder and chief executive. Daba Finance named a second founder, Miod Davith Kahwa. The sources did not state a headcount, though the company said it is significantly growing its team.
What the money is for
littlefish said it will use the funding to expand its team, speed up product development, scale go-to-market activity and deepen its relationships with existing South African banks and merchants. It also plans to enter more than ten additional African markets. Partech's announcement named Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia.
Roberts said in the announcement that banks should work with the institutions merchants already trust, not around them. Matthieu Marchand, a principal at Partech, said the company had built indispensable infrastructure and convinced some of Africa's most powerful financial institutions to back its merchant businesses, and he called it positioned to become the defining merchant infrastructure layer for the continent. Ameya Upadhyay, a general partner at Flourish Ventures, said the founders had built deliberately and earned the trust of the largest institutions on the continent.