Yoco began with four friends and a card reader. It now serves over 200,000 South African businesses.
From a Cape Town office with 24 staff to a payments company valued at an estimated R12.5 billion, Yoco set out to help small sellers accept cards.
The idea came from a restaurant in Silicon Valley. Katlego Maphai saw a makeshift electronic payment system there, and it stuck. He and three friends, Carl Wazen, Bradley Wattrus and Lungisa Matshoba, were also inspired by the success of the American payments company Square. Together they founded Yoco in Cape Town, and after about two years of preparation, the company processed its first transaction in October 2014.
A very small market, hiding in plain sight
The numbers explained the opportunity. In 2016 the company’s chief executive said that over 27 million South Africans had bank cards, but only 6 percent of sellers accepted card payments. When the Western Cape Premier visited the office that year, Yoco had 24 employees, around 1,000 clients and about R300 million in annual transactions.
By the end of 2016 it had 5,000 customers, up from about 500 in 2015. In 2018 it raised a R224 million Series B and launched Yoco Capital, an instant-financing service repaid through card sales; within a year it had lent R55 million, with just 2 percent of those businesses defaulting.
The big rounds
In 2021 Yoco announced a R1.23 billion Series C, the largest single investment ever raised by a South African payments company. In October 2020 it had launched the Yoco Neo, its first standalone card machine. As of 2025, the company reported more than 200,000 customers and over R34 billion a year in processed payments.
Yoco’s story is a clean example of a startup that picked one unglamorous customer, the small seller, and kept solving that customer’s problem.
