Stitch Payments South Africa: How They Power SA’s Biggest Brands

Stitch is a South African payments company, founded in Cape Town in 2019 by Kiaan Pillay, Priyen Pillay, and Junaid Dadan. It builds the payment infrastructure behind some of the country's biggest brands, including Takealot, MTN, Vodacom, and TFG's Bash, per Stitch's own site and the Daily Maverick. It has raised over $107 million across five rounds, capped by a $55 million Series B in April 2025, per TechCabal. Stitch is changing the payments game by treating checkout as a revenue engine, not a plumbing afterthought: one API for cards, Capitec Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and now Buy Now Pay Later. Here is the full Stitch story, plus exactly what your store can steal from how they think about payments. From V8 Media, the team behind R2+ billion in client sales since 2018.

Who is behind Stitch?

Stitch was founded in 2019 in Cape Town by Kiaan Pillay, Priyen Pillay, and Junaid Dadan, per the company's about page and Wikipedia.

Kiaan Pillay is the co-founder and CEO. The team came out of the fintech world and built Stitch to fix one painful problem.

Moving money in South Africa was a mess of middlemen, broken integrations, and gateways that fell over on payday weekends.

So they built infrastructure. Boring word. Massive payoff.

The bet was simple. If you control the rails under the payment, fewer things break, and more sales actually go through.

Here are the fast facts before we get into how they grew.

Stitch	Detail
Founders	Kiaan Pillay (CEO), Priyen Pillay, Junaid Dadan
Founded	2019, Cape Town, South Africa
What it is	Enterprise payments infrastructure and payment gateway
Core products	Online payments, in-person, payouts, orchestration, Stitch Express, BNPL
Payment methods	Card, Capitec Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Pay by bank, debit order
Total funding	$107m+ across five rounds (per TechCabal)
Notable clients	Takealot, MTN, Vodacom, TFG's Bash, Mr D, Hollywoodbets, Luno
Certifications	ISO 27001 and PCI DSS Level 1

Sources: Stitch about page and stitch.money product pages; Stitch Money on Wikipedia; funding via TechCabal and TechCentral; client list and BNPL launch via the Daily Maverick (6 May 2026).

So why does a fintech story matter to you if you sell sneakers or supplements? Because Stitch obsesses over the exact moment most stores lose money.

The checkout. The last five seconds. The part founders ignore while they pour another R50,000 into Meta ads.

How did Stitch grow into SA's payments powerhouse?

Stitch did not appear overnight. It stacked round after round and kept widening what it could do.

It raised $4 million in seed funding in February 2021, then a $2 million seed extension in October 2021, per Crunchbase and Wikipedia.

Then a $21 million Series A in February 2022, led by The Spruce House Partnership.

Then a $25 million Series A extension in October 2023, led by Ribbit Capital.

Then the big one. A $55 million Series B in April 2025, roughly R1 billion at the time, led by QED Investors, Glynn Capital, Flourish Ventures, and Norrsken22, per TechCabal and TechCentral.

That took total funding past $107 million. For a Cape Town company, that is serious.

The backer list is the tell. Stitch is funded by Ribbit Capital and PayPal Ventures, plus the founders of Klarna, Monzo, and Robinhood, and senior leaders at Coinbase, per Stitch's own site.

When the people who built the world's biggest fintechs put money in, they are not betting on a logo. They are betting on the rails.

Stitch also bought its way into new territory. In January 2025 it acquired ExiPay to add in-person card payments, per Wikipedia.

That is the omnichannel play. Online and in-store payments on one platform, one ledger, one view of the customer.

The lesson for your business is not "go raise R1 billion". It is the discipline underneath.

Build the boring engine first. Then scale. Same rule applies to your ad spend. Fix the funnel, then buy the traffic. We break it down in how to optimise your online store for profit.

What does Stitch actually do?

Most people hear "payment gateway" and think it is one thing. It is not. Stitch is a stack.

In 2023 it grew from a single payments tool into an end-to-end payment services provider, adding card payments, debit orders, and orchestration, per Stitch's own history.

Here is the stack in plain English.

Product	What it does for a store
Online payments	Accept card, Capitec Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Pay by bank through one API
Stitch Express	Plug-and-play checkout for Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, and Webflow
Payment orchestration	Route transactions across providers, add redundancy, lift approval rates
In-person payments	Card-present and POS, added via the ExiPay acquisition
Payouts	Refunds, withdrawals, and disbursements, around the clock
BNPL	Split a purchase into 2 to 6 monthly instalments at checkout

The point is not the length of that list. The point is that it all sits on one platform.

One integration. One dashboard. One place where refunds and reconciliation actually line up.

If you have ever watched a team try to match online sales to in-store refunds on a spreadsheet on Sharon's laptop, you know why this matters.

One ledger you trust beats five tools you babysit.

Why checkout is where you bleed money

You did the hard part. You paid for the click. You earned the trust. You got the customer to the checkout.

Then the payment step tripped them like a loose paving brick outside Home Affairs.

This is where most South African stores leak cash. Not because the product is bad. Because the last five seconds feel weird, slow, or sketchy.

A customer does not need proof to abandon a cart. They need a feeling.

A strange redirect. A clunky pop-up. A payment option named like a random fintech from 2016. They bounce.

This is not theory. South Africa has trained shoppers to be careful. Copycat sites, scam ads, URLs one letter off the real one.

So caution is the default. And you cannot out-market a broken checkout.

You can spend another R50,000 on Meta. You can tweak creative until your designer quits and starts a goat farm.

If the payment moment feels unsafe, you lose anyway. This is the same trap we cover in not monitoring your checkout completion rate.

Stitch's whole pitch is built on this. Fix the checkout and the same traffic converts better.

How does Stitch Express lift checkout conversion?

Stitch Express is the part that touches your store directly. It is a checkout plugin for Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, and Webflow.

It is built on the same infrastructure that powers the big enterprises, per Stitch. So a small store gets enterprise-grade rails.

Two things make it convert. Method-led display and familiar wallets.

Most merchants think shoppers choose a provider. They don't. They choose a method.

Card. Apple Pay. Google Pay. Capitec Pay. Whatever feels easiest and safest right now.

So showing a list of cryptic provider names creates friction. It is like a restaurant menu written in supplier codes. Technically accurate. Useless.

Express leans into method names and a checkout that stays inside your brand. No "am I still on the right site?" panic.

Wallets are the clearest win. Stripe's own testing showed that offering Apple Pay lifted conversion on eligible mobile checkouts.

Why? Because the customer skips typing a 16-digit card number on a phone, and they trust the wallet brand.

Most South African sales happen on mobile. Every extra form field on a phone is a conversion tax. Wallets remove it.

Capitec Pay matters here too. Capitec is the country's largest retail bank by customer base, and Stitch is a certified Capitec Pay provider, per Stitch.

That means millions of shoppers can pay straight from their banking app. Familiar equals trusted. Trusted equals paid.

What is Stitch's Buy Now Pay Later play?

In May 2026 Stitch added Buy Now Pay Later for South African merchants, per the Daily Maverick.

It lets shoppers split a purchase into 2 to 6 monthly instalments, right at checkout.

It runs through Stitch Express on Shopify and WooCommerce, and through the API for enterprise clients.

This is not a niche experiment. Several hundred merchants were already live at launch, including Lego and The North Face, per the Daily Maverick.

Why does BNPL matter for your store? Two reasons.

• It lifts conversion on bigger baskets, because the price tag feels smaller per month.
• It can lift average order value, because R3,000 split four ways feels doable.

Be honest about your margins before you switch it on. BNPL is a tool, not magic.

But for considered purchases, furniture, electronics, premium gear, it removes the "I'll think about it" stall. The same instinct shows up in the biggest ecommerce conversion rate mistake.

How does Stitch handle fraud and trust?

You can lose a customer in the two seconds after they click Pay. Not to a competitor. To a feeling.

One redirect that looks wrong and they are gone.

Stitch runs on an ISO 27001 and PCI DSS Level 1 certified platform, per the company. Those are the boring security badges that actually mean something.

It also ships an embedded fraud tool with rule-based, real-time detection.

Fraud control is a tightrope. Too loose and the criminals get through. Too strict and you decline good, paying customers.

That false-decline problem is brutal. You lose the sale and you annoy a real customer who did nothing wrong.

This is where orchestration earns its keep. Stitch can route a transaction across providers and add automatic redundancy.

So if one route to the bank fails, another picks it up. Fewer failed payments at 2am on a payday weekend.

Redundancy is not a sexy marketing word. But it is the difference between "paid" and "failed".

And a failed payment on a card the customer knows is valid is a trust killer. They blame you, not the gateway.

What can your store steal from Stitch?

You do not need $107 million or a banking licence to use this thinking. You need to treat checkout like a product, not a settings page.

Here are the moves baked into how Stitch operates.

1. Build the engine before you scale. Stitch fixed the rails first, then grew. Fix your funnel before you buy more traffic.
2. Lead with the method, not the provider. Label payments by what customers recognise, like Apple Pay, not "PaySomethingPro".
3. Put familiar wallets first. Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Capitec Pay cut typing and lift trust on mobile.
4. Add redundancy. One route fails, another catches it. Fewer dead payments, more sales.
5. Use BNPL with eyes open. Great for considered buys, but only if the margin maths works.
6. Keep one ledger. Online and in-store on one platform means refunds and reconciliation stop being a nightmare.

That is the whole game. Not luck. No guessing. Just a clean, fast, trusted checkout that gets out of the way.

One of our own clients leans on this. Skin Functional uses Stitch as a payment gateway for stability and wallet payments, and a big share of one promo's sales ran through it, per our interview. The full story is in how Skin Functional grew 50% year on year.

How V8 Media builds ecommerce brands like this

Sending more traffic to a broken checkout is just paying more to lose. We fix the leak first. Then we pour fuel on it.

We run both sides. We drive the right traffic with Meta Ads and Google Ads. Then we fix the offer, the landing page, and the checkout so the sale actually happens.

Stitch handles the rails. We handle what lands on them. The right person, the right offer, a checkout that gets out of the way.

We have done this since 2018. R2+ billion in client sales. Win the click, then win the sale.