Editor’s note: African-Startups is a sister publication of EU-Startups, bringing trusted coverage of startups, venture capital, and innovation across Africa.
Kenyan FinTech startup Lemonade Payments has landed a new backer in Plug and Play Ventures, the global venture capital arm of Silicon Valley innovation platform Plug and Play. While the size of the investment has not been disclosed, the investment comes as the two-year-old company pushes to expand its footprint across African markets.
Founded in 2023 by Mark Machiri Kihara and Andrew Kibe, Lemonade Payments set out to address what its founders identified as a persistent trust problem in African digital payments. The founders, who both spent years in banking and financial services, said they had witnessed how the exposure of personal details during transactions left users vulnerable to fraud and unwanted contact, while undermining confidence in the tools meant to serve them.
The company has built its platform around enabling seamless transactions without exposing users’ personal details, allowing individuals to send, receive, and manage money while keeping their information private. For businesses, Lemonade offers a white-label solution that lets them collect customer payments without directly handling sensitive personal data. The platform also serves partners and growth agents through revenue-sharing arrangements and real-time payout tracking.
“We’re honoured to have Plug and Play Ventures join us as we scale our platform, expand into new markets, and continue building products that solve real problems for African businesses,” the startup said in a LinkedIn post.
Plug and Play, known for its network of accelerator programmes and corporate innovation partnerships spanning fintech, mobility, and other sectors globally, joins Lemonade’s cap table as the company works to scale its platform, enter new markets, and expand its product suite.
Tom Fairburn, co-founder of Baobab Network, an early-stage investor and startup accelerator that has backed Lemonade since its early days, called it “an exciting next chapter in the company’s journey to build the payment infrastructure powering the future of Africa.”
In 2024, Baobab Network wrote Lemonade’s first cheque, making the accelerator one of the startup’s earliest institutional backers. Baobab Network had disclosed at the time that it invested $100k in equity in Lemonade as part of a broader batch of investments across African startups working in payments, logistics, real estate, HealthTech, and other sectors.
Lemonade has framed its ambitions as extending beyond payments processing toward building what it calls the infrastructure of trust for Africa’s digital economy. The company said its long-term vision rests on combining privacy-first design with reliable transaction rails to give merchants, enterprises, and individual users the confidence to transact at scale.
With its global network of accelerator programmes and corporate innovation partners, Plug and Play brings more than capital to the table, positioning it as a partner that can help Lemonade refine and scale its privacy-first payments platform as the company builds out compliant infrastructure for markets across the continent.
