Flutterwave expands further across Africa with acquisition of creator platform Disha
In February, Disha, a Nigeria-based platform that allows digital creators to curate, sell digital content, create portfolios and receive payments from their audience globally, announced that it was closing shop.
Before the news, Disha had bootstrapped to more than 20,000 users; at some point, it claimed to have a monthly growth rate of about 100%. Three days after announcing its shutdown, however, Disha did an about-face and said it was thinking of new options for the company and would share an update once it made a new decision.
Earlier this month, a Twitter user noticed Disha FAQs on Flutterwave’s support documents, suggesting that the unicorn company might have acquired the creator platform. Although Disha’s FAQs have been removed, Flutterwave confirmed to TechCrunch today that it has indeed bought the two-year-old platform. The terms of the deal are undisclosed; however, some sources say the purchase price is in six figures.
While Flutterwave has been rumoured to acquire some startups in the past, this is its first public announcement of any acquisition since launching in 2016 to tackle Africa’s payments problems. And what’s more surprising is that the buy is outside payments or fintech.
Disha was founded by Evans Akanno and Rufus Oyemade in 2019 with Blessing Abeng joining a year later. The company is one of the well-known platforms built from Africa, including Selar and Irawo, targeting creators and influencers globally. Disha provided them with tools to create a one-page site to curate and share links, content, portfolios and a checkout system to receive payments.
Although Disha had users globally, its revenues were low, making slightly above $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue. With little revenues and limited resources, Disha showed signs of struggle; even ex-CEO attested to this in a recent LinkedIn post where he expressed burnout while running Disha and Cregital, a design agency he founded and was CEO, a role he stepped down from in September.
“We [the founders] decided to shut down the company because we ran out of resources to continue driving the very valid vision we had,” ex-CTO Oyemade told TechCrunch in an email. “With Flutterwave, we now have a way to drive both value for creators and revenue to sustain the business. We are happy to have gotten the call from Flutterwave, which actually kept hopes alive.”
Oyemade will continue to lead the technology behind the product with a new role as software and architectural lead. Akanno and Abeng, the ex-CMO, left the company to pursue other projects.
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