Stitch Raised $25 Million From Andreessen Horowitz to Make Open Banking Work the Way it Was Supposed To
Open banking has a gap between promise and implementation that most people who do not work in financial infrastructure have no reason to know about. The promise is elegant: give consumers and businesses a way to securely share their financial data with apps and services they choose to use, and enable direct account‑to‑account payments that bypass the card networks and their associated fees. The implementation requires a layer of technical infrastructure that connects every bank, every payment system, and every financial data source through standardized APIs that actually work reliably at production scale.
Stitch, the Cape Town‑based open banking infrastructure company founded by Kiaan Pillay and Nathan Jeffery, raised $25 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz in May 2026. The round marks a16z's first significant African fintech infrastructure investment in several years and reflects the firm's stated conviction that the financial infrastructure layer in African markets represents a durable and defensible commercial opportunity.
Stitch builds the API layer that sits between financial institutions and the applications that need to access their data or initiate payments. The platform currently connects with over 400 banks and financial institutions across South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, and other African markets, providing three core capabilities: account‑to‑account payment initiation, which allows merchants and apps to collect payments directly from bank accounts without card intermediaries; account verification, which confirms account ownership and details before disbursing loans, wages, or refunds; and financial data access, which lets users share their transaction history, balances, and account details with applications they authorize.
The PayShap integration is the most commercially significant in the South African market. PayShap is South Africa's real‑time interbank payment network, launched by the South African Reserve Bank and major commercial banks as a domestic alternative to card‑based payments for everyday transactions. Stitch's integration with PayShap means that applications built on the Stitch API can offer PayShap payment acceptance without building the bank integrations independently. MTN, the pan‑African telecommunications company with mobile money operations across multiple markets, is also a Stitch integration partner.
Andreessen Horowitz's decision to lead this round at Series A stage reflects a specific investment philosophy: infrastructure companies in rapidly developing financial markets can build dominant market positions by becoming the default connectivity layer before the commercial volume fully materializes. The firms that build the pipes before the water flows typically capture disproportionate value from the eventual flow.
