PawaPay has secured a Payment Service Provider licence in Kenya after processing three billion mobile-money transactions and more than €10 billion in payments across the continent.

The company, operating in Kenya through Quidexplus Kenya Limited, has announced it has been licensed as a payment service provider by the Central Bank of Kenya, describing Kenya as an important market for its continued investment in regulated payments infrastructure.

The Kenyan licence comes as PawaPay reaches a scale that would have been difficult to see when the business was still closely tied to the betting industry. In June, the company crossed three billion mobile-money transactions. According to the firm, the first billion transactions took more than four years, the second arrived in less than 12 months and the third took less than nine months. PawaPay’s daily transaction volumes rose from about 2.4 million in September 2024 to roughly five million by June 2026.

The firm also announced it was working with some 50 mobile-money operators across 20 African markets, more than one billion mobile-money wallets were accessible through its network, and more than €10 billion in payments had been processed. It’s currently in 23 live markets, and more than €13 billion in payments have been settled.

Working with telecom operators, local payment entities, settlement accounts, foreign-exchange arrangements, regulatory approvals and reconciliation systems, PawaPay manages operator connectivity, settlement, FX, reconciliation and regulatory coverage across its markets. Due to fragmented African markets, PawaPay works under separate local entities.

Payments Techco OÜ owns the merchant contracts while locally registered Payment Providers carry out payment-processing services in their respective territories. That infrastructure is the product PawaPay is selling. But it was not built in isolation from the rest of the group’s history.

Danish entrepreneur Kresten Buch, who is behind the group, has been in software, sports data, online media and betting for years. Buch’s tech ventures generated more than €200 million in revenue between 1997 and 2001 and had two exits before turning his attention to African startups.

He brought Australian online betting company Centrebet into Scandinavia and grew it into a substantial business. He later founded Statman, a sports-data company that was sold to Betgenius in the mid-2000s. He also invested in Danish betting company Danbook, which was subsequently sold to Sportingbet in 2011.

He also built and exited bold.dk, a major Danish football website whose profits gave him the freedom to move into startup investing. His move into Africa began quietly in Kenya. While attending a business course at Stanford, he met David Owino, then chief operating officer of Kenya Data Networks (later integrated into Liquid Telecom). Owino introduced him to East Africa’s mobile-money market and the changes taking place around mobile technology. Buch subsequently came to Kenya to investigate the opportunity.

The relationship led into Nairobi’s early technology-investment scene. Buch and his network became involved in IPO48, a 48-hour startup investment programme that brought entrepreneurs, developers and designers together to build companies and compete for funding.

The attraction was not simply that Kenya had startups, but Buch saw an opportunity in the mobile space as mobile phones were becoming the primary computing device for millions of Africans, not the computer. Mobile money was becoming a payment rail that could potentially support digital commerce. That observation became the basis for a much larger investment effort. A fund was born and co-working space was born.

Buch founded 88mph in 2011 as a seed fund and accelerator focused on African mobile and internet companies. Its own investment history records a €500,000 Kenyan pilot in 2011, followed by a $1.2 million Kenyan accelerator, a $1.2 million programme in South Africa and a $1.5 million Nigerian programme through 440.ng.

The geography was significant. Nairobi became one of its principal bases. Cape Town became another. Lagos was added through 440.ng, giving Buch exposure to three of the continent’s most important technology markets.

The portfolio included companies such as Nairobi Garage, Mdundo, Ghafla!, HiviSasa, BookNow, MPepea, Manyatta Rent, Closet49 and other early-stage African businesses.

Mdundo eventually became one of the more visible outcomes. The music platform expanded across African markets before listing on Nasdaq First North Denmark in 2020. 88mph described it as one of its portfolio companies. Ghafla was another early Nairobi win. The entertainment site grew so fast during its early days, sparking several offshoots of entertainment sites by mainstream media groups. Radio Africa Group unveiled MPASHO while Standard Media Group launched the Nairobian.

This is not a portfolio personally owned by Buch. 88mph has multiple investors and its portfolio companies have their own founders and shareholders. But Buch was building something broader than a collection of investments: relationships with founders, operators, investors and technology businesses across several African markets.

The early experience gave Buch and the team first-hand market insights and local exposure that also extended beyond startups, including a farm in Kenya, an interest in Nakuru AllStars football club and a water borehole in western Kenya. More local investors then joined, resulting in a network spanning Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria. Then mBet happened.

In 2014, 88mph took a minority stake in Uganda-based sports-betting company mBet. That investment sits near the beginning of the lineage that became betPawa, an online betting brand owned by Rwanda-based Mchezo Limited. The betting brand runs on a gaming technology platform provided by software arm PawaTech. betPawa was launched in Uganda in 2014 and then expanded into Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Malawi, DRC, Zambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon and Benin.

In 2018, betPawa partnered with Nigerian Afrobeat artist Mr Eazi to launch Empawa Africa, a music accelerator programme for emerging African artists, and the betting business exposed the group to a particular African payments problem at significant scale.

Customers were depositing and withdrawing money through mobile-money systems. Operators had to reconcile huge numbers of transactions. Money had to move rapidly between betting accounts, mobile wallets and settlement accounts. Liquidity could become a commercial problem when customer withdrawals surged. These experiences would later become part of PawaPay’s institutional knowledge.

PawaPay began as the payments arm of pawaTech, the wider technology group behind the betPawa business. In early 2020, the payments operation was separated as a standalone business. By August 2021, PawaPay was operating in ten African markets, including Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia, Nigeria, Cameroon, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and was processing more than 10 million transactions a week.

In the same year, PawaPay raised $9 million led by 88mph and MSA Capital, with Kepple Ventures, Vunani Capital and Zagadat Capital participating. The round brought together several strands of the African technology network Buch had been building: Buch’s investment platform 88mph, MSA Capital and Mr Eazi’s Zagadat Capital.

Nigerian music entrepreneur Oluwatosin Ajibade, better known as Mr Eazi, had already been moving into technology investment before PawaPay. In 2014, he founded Phonetrader, an online marketplace for used mobile phones which received backing from 440NG, the Nigerian startup accelerator founded by 88mph and L5Lab. 88mph had earlier worked with Kenyan musician Francis Amisi, also known as Frasha from the Kenyan music trio P-Unit, to launch Mdundo in Kenya around September 2012.

As co-founders and ambassadors, Mdundo built a needed catalogue and network of other artists for its content. Ajibade’s Phonetrader, L5Lab and 88mph built a strong earlier network and made deal flow into the African technology ecosystem less cumbersome. Ajibade did not stop at Phonetrader, as he went on to form Zagadat Capital and Choplife Gaming. In 2021, Zagadat Capital participated in PawaPay’s $9 million seed round, and Choplife Gaming entered into a four-year licensing agreement with pawaTech to develop betPawa in Nigeria in 2025.

The agreement extended into Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Benin and Ghana, and Choplife was willing to co-invest in the Nigerian market, putting the chairman, Mr. Ajibade, a key figure in the entire operation as an investor and as a co-operator fueling African technology, entertainment, betting and payments networks around the continent. Though not without their fair share of trials, closures, market exits like the recent Rwanda Central Services hub and legal issues, the group continues to grow, with lessons learned every day.

Uganda is particularly important because it appears at several points in the chronology. It was one of the first markets for the betting business and became one of PawaPay’s early payments markets. Uganda later became one of the markets where PawaPay saw strongest growth. In late 2023, more than 1.2 million betPawa customers had won during an unusually favorable run of football results. The group subsequently raised $12.1 million from shareholders to support operators and meet withdrawal demand.

There are also difficulties moving money internationally, foreign-exchange shortages and limits on the amounts that could move through telecom operators’ mobile-money wallets. For a payments infrastructure company, the lesson was practical. Moving money in Africa is not simply about connecting an API to a mobile-money operator. It involves liquidity, settlement, FX, local regulation and the ability to reconcile money moving through several systems at once.

Those problems are precisely the ones PawaPay now sells itself as solving for other businesses.

The Congo markets show how wide that infrastructure has become. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, PawaPay’s current local Payment Provider is Kerry Payments RDC SARLU. In neighbouring Congo-Brazzaville, it operates through a separate entity, Kerry Payments Brazzaville.

The distinction is important because there is no single Central African payments market that can simply be switched on from London, Tallinn or Nairobi. Each country requires its own combination of regulatory permissions, local entities, operators, settlement arrangements and commercial relationships.

The same geographic spread exists on the betting side.

BetPawa operates in the Democratic Republic of Congo through a locally licensed operation, while in Congo-Brazzaville the brand operates through Mistral Bet Sarl under a licence from the Ministry of Budget, Public Accounts and Public Portfolio. pawaTech and betPawa have accumulated relationships and operating experience across markets that are difficult to treat as one regional system.

The payments business later began moving into remittances as well.

In 2025, PawaPay launched remittance services in Congo-Brazzaville and Uganda, connecting to MTN and Airtel. Its remittance network now includes markets such as Cameroon, Tanzania, Uganda, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, Zambia and Kenya.

With the three-billion transactions, there is evidence the platform has scaled quickly and is solving a real problem. Jamie Steell, PawaPay’s chief operating officer, provides a more useful picture of where that growth is currently coming from. In a June 2026 interview with TechCabal, Steell said the strongest growth on PawaPay’s network was coming from Ghana, Tanzania, Cameroon and Uganda.

The four markets show the breadth of PawaPay’s current growth across West, East and Central Africa. Ghana and Tanzania are mature mobile-money markets with large volumes of consumer and business transactions. Uganda connects directly to the group’s earlier betPawa history. Cameroon gives PawaPay a growing position in Central and Francophone Africa.

Kenya mobile-money subscriptions hit 54.01 million according to the latest Communications Authority report. TechMoran

PawaPay has also been building beyond simply connecting merchants to operators. Steell has been running a PawaPay Builders programme in Cameroon aimed at developers and technical founders, another sign that the company is trying to deepen its relationships with the technology ecosystem around its payment infrastructure.

PawaPay’s business today is considerably broader than the betting operation from which it emerged.

Its customers include businesses in digital services, transport, remittances, retail and humanitarian payments. PawaPay says companies including Deriv and GiveDirectly use its infrastructure to operate across multiple African markets.

The company’s proposition is to let those businesses connect once rather than build individual payment integrations country by country.

That means PawaPay takes responsibility for the operator relationships, payment routing, settlement, FX, reconciliation and regulatory coverage that would otherwise become the merchant’s problem.

The company says it has also used stablecoins in its treasury operations since 2022 to reduce settlement float and make movement between currencies more predictable. The scale of the network makes that increasingly valuable.

Its settlement timelines vary by market, reflecting the underlying differences between African payment systems. Kenya and Uganda operate on different settlement arrangements from the Democratic Republic of Congo or Congo-Brazzaville.

The single API therefore hides rather than eliminates the complexity. That complexity is the business.

The wider pawaTech group has also become a substantial business in its own right, recording revenue of €8.02 million and profit of €720,000 in 2021. Revenue increased to €10.51 million in 2022 and €20.50 million in 2023 before reaching €78.46 million in 2024 and €100.56 million in 2025.

Profit rose from €720,000 in 2021 to €940,000 in 2022 and €1.17 million in 2023, before jumping to €50.61 million in 2024 and falling to €36.31 million in 2025.

Payments Techco OÜ, the company that owns the merchant contracts used by PawaPay, reported €12.86 million in revenue and €590,000 in profit in 2024. The corporate structure reflects the evolution of the businesses. PawaTech remains the wider technology and betting group. PawaPay is the payments infrastructure business. Payments Techco sits within the payments structure used to contract with merchants, while local Payment Providers handle market-level processing.

Buch’s influence in Africa also extends beyond the pawaTech companies. In South Africa, he participated as an investor in FARO’s $6 million 2025 funding round. The recommerce company buys surplus and returned fashion inventory and resells it at discounted prices, founded by a former Nairobi-based entrepreneur behind Zumi.

Kenya was the original market where he developed relationships around mobile money and startups. South Africa became an 88mph investment and accelerator market. Nigeria came through 440.ng and later the pawaTech and Choplife businesses. Uganda became central to the mBet and betPawa history and remains one of PawaPay’s stronger growth markets. Ghana and Tanzania are now among PawaPay’s fastest-growing markets. Rwanda, Zambia, Benin and other countries became part of the betting and payments networks. The two Congos added another layer of Central African operating experience.

For more than a decade, Buch has accumulated exposure to founders, investors, operators, regulators, technology businesses, betting companies and payment systems across a large part of the continent. PawaPay emerged from that infrastructure in 2020. A year later it raised $9 million, and with five million transactions every day and presence in 23 markets, PawaPay is onto something.

The Kenyan licence now gives that network a locally authorised presence in one of the world’s most important mobile-money markets. According to the GSMA State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2026, the global mobile-money industry processed more than $2.1 trillion in transactions in 2025, up 23% from the previous year. The industry reached 2.3 billion registered accounts and 593 million active 30-day accounts, while merchant payments grew 42% to $155 billion. Sub-Saharan Africa remained the main growth engine, accounting for more than two-thirds of the increase in registered accounts during the year. GSMA said annual mobile-money transaction value has doubled from $1 trillion to more than $2 trillion in just four years.

For PawaPay, the authorisation represents an important milestone in our long-term investment in Kenya and our approach to building regulated payments infrastructure across Africa.