REasy banks $1.8M to streamline African trade payments

Cameroonian fintech startup REasy has secured a $1.8 million pre-seed investment to expand its cross-border payment and trade infrastructure for small and medium enterprises.

The funding was led by Ingressive Capital, Launch Africa, 54 Collective and Digital Africa, alongside fintech angels including Christophe Chausson, Mathias Léopoldie and Joël Nana Kontchou.
REasy intends to deploy the capital toward technology development, regulatory licensing across new markets and accelerated customer acquisition.

At the heart of REasy’s proposition is a platform that links African payment rails—such as Orange Money, MTN Mobile Money and bank transfers—with international settlement networks like Alipay, WeChat Pay and UnionPay. This enables SMEs to make cross-border payments efficiently while preserving traceability and compliance.
A notable development is the framework co-developed with the Bank of Central African States, which permits compliant foreign exchange operations for SME transactions below $10,000—an underserved segment in traditional trade finance.

Brice Mba, Co-CEO of REasy, said the company will “use the funding to strengthen our technology infrastructure and secure new licences in our target markets.” He emphasised the goal of enabling “more African businesses to trade globally, without friction.”

Founded in 2023 by Mba, Mathieu Wing, Richard Kue and Stéphane Meng, the startup already processes payments for thousands of importers on the China–Cameroon trade corridor—a corridor that saw $3.71 billion in imports in 2023. According to REasy, settlements that once took days or weeks can now occur within minutes.

Industry observers have flagged the BEAC-aligned foreign exchange breakthrough as a strategic differentiator. Lina Kacyem of Launch Africa described it as a “defensible competitive moat,” particularly given the longstanding obstacles in African trade: delays of up to two weeks, high transaction costs, and rejection of small-ticket transactions by conventional banks.

REasy’s roadmap includes expansion into West African markets such as Nigeria, where annual imports from China exceed $25 billion, and integration with the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System to bolster intra-African trade links between 2027 and 2028. Over the longer term, REasy aims to connect Africa to South-South trade corridors such as India–East Africa and Brazil–West Africa by 2030.