African payments company, Accrue, raises $1.58 million

African cross-border payments company Accrue has announced that it has raised $1.58 million in its latest seed round. With the funds, it plans to expand its product offering to other African countries and shore up its team.

The details 

• The company, co-founded by former employees of the fintech company, Helicarrier, announced the raise in a blog post commemorating its 3rd anniversary. 
• According to the announcement, the seed round was led by the crypto venture firm, Lattice Fund and supported by Maven 11, Distributed Capital and other investors. 
• Accrue hopes to drive the expansion of its product across Africa and add members to its team. 

How it works 

• Accrue runs a platform that allows users to send money to other African countries in their respective local currencies. 
• On the back end, the firm facilitates these transactions using stablecoins through its peer-to-peer network of agents, Cashramp. 
• These agents deposit stablecoins on Cashramp which functions as an escrow between agents across countries. 
• When a user initiates a transaction in their local currency, an agent close to them is assigned, who then collects the fiat payment. 
• At the receiving end, another agent completes the payment to the receiver in their local currency. 
• The receiving agent then gets the stablecoin equivalent of the fiat payment made from the escrow, Cashramp. 
• The firm deducts fees which it shares with the agents. 
• Accrue says it has onboarded 200,000 users across the six African countries where it is currently active— Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Zambia. 

Before now 

• Accrue, founded in 2021, started initially as a way for users to invest in cryptocurrencies and other investment instruments in a simple way. 
• It employed dollar-cost averaging, an investment method that allowed users to invest a lump sum in staggered bits over a period instead of all at once. 
• However, following the crypto market crash in 2022, it pivoted to cross-border payments. 
• Mariblock reported that in the same year, Helicarrier acquired a significant equity interest in Accrue and merged its retail crypto trading service, Buycoins Basic with the platform.