{"id":625882,"date":"2026-01-21T09:02:03","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T07:02:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=625882"},"modified":"2026-01-21T11:40:56","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T09:40:56","slug":"south-african-friends-co-founded-a-r1-8-billion-payments-giant-with-paypal-and-trevor-noahs-backing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/business\/625882-south-african-friends-co-founded-a-r1-8-billion-payments-giant-with-paypal-and-trevor-noahs-backing.html","title":{"rendered":"South African friends co-founded a R1.8-billion payments giant with PayPal and Trevor Noah’s backing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Kiaan and Priyen Pillay are co-founders of South African payments company Stitch Money, which has raised over $107 million (R1.78 billion) in funding since its founding in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite sharing surnames, the two are not related. However, they have been family friends since their early childhoods. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kiaan is Stitch’s chief executive officer and is the public face of the company. He has been described as a “serial builder” for his work in the South African fintech ecosystem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With a Bachelor’s Degree in computer science and finance from the University of Cape Town, his first venture was social media platform Pelichat, which he co-founded with Lebo Morojele in 2015. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In July 2017, he moved to London-headquartered Root, a platform started as a programmable bank account and now helps companies build, launch, and manage digital insurance products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A year later, he joined pan-African identification verification service Smile Identity as one of its earliest employees. His role was head of partnerships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Priyen is Stitch’s chief technology officer, responsible for driving the technical architecture behind the company. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He studied various courses at IIE Varsity College, including project management and property development, IT project management, software development, and computer engineering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He began his professional career as a property development manager at Daveglen 546 Investments in KwaZulu-Natal in 2012.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the last few months at the company in 2016, he took up a second job as a full-stack engineer at Immedia in Durban, which included working on projects for Interbet International.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2019, the pair joined up with their friend Junaid Dadan to form Stitch. The primary goal was to simplify the payments ecosystem with an application programming interface (API)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dadan brought his experience in banking, corporate finance, financial consulting, and telecommunications from giants including MTN, Cell C, McKinsey, HSBC, and Stripe to the table. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company launched publicly as Stitch Money in February 2021 after raising seed funding of $4 million. Its initial focus was on enabling businesses to securely access data in clients’ financial accounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rapid product expansion <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
Priyen Pillay (left), Kiaan Pillay (centre), and Junaid Dadan (right). <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Stitch started piloting its first payment product, called Pay-ins, in April 2021. In October 2021, the company raised another $2 million in a seed extension round. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next month, it launched its first payment method \u2014 Pay by bank \u2014 enabling merchants to accept fast, secure payments directly from customers’ bank accounts without entering their account details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In February 2022, Stitch announced it raised $21 million in Series A funding led by New York-based investment firm The Spruce House Partnership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That helped fund its development of API infrastructure and an embedded finance platform. Over the next two years, it launched many new products: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  • April 2022: <\/strong>LinkPay \u2014 First-in-market Pay by bank solution allowing users to link their bank accounts for one-click returning payments.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • July 2022:<\/strong> Payouts \u2014 Allows businesses to send money to any South African bank account. <\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • November 2022:<\/strong> Manual EFT support<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • February 2023: <\/strong>CashPay \u2014 Allows payments for digital services using cash and supports solutions like Capitec Pay.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • March 2023:<\/strong> Card payments, debit orders, and payment orchestration added, marking Stitch’s evolution into an end-to-end payments services provider.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • September 2023:<\/strong> WigWag (renamed Stitch Express in 2025) \u2014 Supports payment links and other services for smaller businesses and startups.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • November 2023: <\/strong>Pay with crypto \u2014 Allows customers to make payments with popular cryptocurrency wallets, including Binance, Luno, and VALR. <\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • July 2024: <\/strong>Digital wallet support \u2014 Launched a single integration for Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n

    Its acquisition of ExiPay in January 2025 enabled Stitch to add in-person payments to expand beyond online-based services. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    In April 2025, Stitch announced it pulled another $55 million in investment from a Series B funding round, bringing its total funding raised to $107 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Stitch’s well-known individual investors include South African comedian Trevor Noah, Coinbase president and COO Emilie Choi, and Robinhood founder Vlad Tenev.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It has also received funding from major investment firms such as PayPal Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Flourish Ventures, QED Investors, Glynn Capital, The Raba Partnership, and Firstminute Capital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"\"
    Humble beginnings \u2014 The small Stitch Money team in early 2021. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
    \"\"\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
    Stitch team in the second half of 2021, around the time it launched its first payment method. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
    \"\"\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
    Stitch team in late 2023, shortly before its Series A seed extension funding announcement. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
    \"\"\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
    A much larger Stitch team in 2025, before the announcement of its Series B funding round.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    In the last six years, Stitch Money has grown from offering just one payment method to being a full end-to-end payments services provider.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341042,"featured_media":625908,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[56846,88560,102950,102947,102948,81047,102944,102945,102943,99596,102946,69028,96794,102949],"class_list":["post-625882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-financial-services","tag-fintechs","tag-firstminute-capital","tag-flourish-ventures","tag-glynn-capital","tag-kiaan-pillay","tag-payments-service-provider-psp","tag-paypal-ventures","tag-priyen-pillay","tag-qed-investors","tag-ribbit-capital","tag-stitch","tag-stitch-money","tag-the-raba-partnership"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625882"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341042"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625882"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":626035,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625882\/revisions\/626035"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}