Pesapal is a Kenyan payment gateway company founded in 2009 by Agosta Liko, one of East Africa's most enduring fintech entrepreneurs. At a time when online commerce in Kenya was virtually nonexistent and M-Pesa dominated person-to-person transfers, Pesapal set out to solve a different problem: enabling businesses to accept payments online. The company built a platform that aggregated mobile money, card payments, and bank transfers into a single checkout experience, allowing Kenyan businesses to sell goods and services on the internet for the first time.
Liko launched Pesapal from Nairobi during the same period that iHub Nairobi was catalysing the city's nascent tech scene. The timing was deliberate - the landing of TEAMS Cable Kenya and the Bandwidth Cost Collapse Kenya were making internet access affordable, while Safaricom's M-Pesa had created a cashless payment infrastructure that reached millions of Kenyans who had never held a bank account. Pesapal's insight was that M-Pesa's dominance in person-to-person payments had not extended to e-commerce. Merchants still lacked the tools to accept mobile money payments on websites or apps. Pesapal filled that gap.
The company's early customers were airlines, hotels, schools, and event organisers - sectors where online booking and payment were becoming essential. Pesapal integrated with M-Pesa, Airtel Money, Visa, Mastercard, and multiple bank payment channels, abstracting the complexity of Kenya's fragmented payment landscape into a single API. For a Kenyan hotel wanting to accept bookings from international tourists paying by card and local customers paying by M-Pesa, Pesapal was the only solution that handled both in one integration.
Unlike many Kenyan startups that pursued aggressive venture funding and rapid regional expansion, Pesapal grew methodically. The company raised modest external funding compared to peers like Cellulant or Tala, preferring to scale on revenue rather than burn rate. By the early 2020s, Pesapal had expanded to Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda, processing payments for thousands of businesses across East Africa. The company also moved into point-of-sale hardware, offering card terminals and integrated payment systems for physical retail - a recognition that the future of African payments was omnichannel, not purely digital.
Pesapal's trajectory reflects an alternative model of tech company building in Silicon Savannah. While venture-backed startups chased hockey-stick growth curves and billion-dollar valuations, Pesapal built a profitable, sustainable business over more than a decade. Liko's approach - patient growth, revenue-first economics, and deep integration with local payment systems - contrasts sharply with the more dramatic arcs of companies like Sendy or Copia Global, which raised significantly more capital but ultimately failed. In the broader story of Kenyan fintech, Pesapal occupies the pragmatic middle ground: not a moonshot, but a company that reliably solved a real problem for real businesses and survived to tell the story.
See Also
Sources
- Hersman, Erik. "Pesapal: Quietly Building East Africa's Payment Infrastructure." White African (blog), 2012.
- Bright, Jake. "Inside Pesapal, the Kenyan Fintech That Chose Profits Over Hype." TechCrunch, 2019.
- Lielacher, Alex. "How Pesapal Is Powering E-Commerce Payments in East Africa." Bitcoin Africa, March 2018.
- Kuo, Lily. "The Kenyan Startups Building Africa's Digital Payment Rails." Quartz Africa, 2017.