OyaPay, which launched operations in December 2017, was trying to digitize the payment landscape in Nigeria. The now-defunct startup was trying to ensure that offline businesses could accept payment and take forward orders from their customers with or without a smartphone.

OyaPay was founded by Abdulhamid Hassan and Achille out of Achille’s apartment in Paris with a simple mission statement:

“We want to turn every smartphone into Payment and checkout method in emerging markets”

The need for digital services is certainly there since 98% consumer payments in Nigeria is still based on cash. OyaPay was positioning itself to join the ranks of Paystack, Flutterwave, Paga, TeampApt in the African market.

According to media reports Hassan had taken a small seed round from a senior family member (an uncle) who pushed back on the idea of diluting his investment.

Hassan explained the closure of the service in a blog post:

Our grand experiment is at an end after 365 days.

The team will be moving into executing great new work, and this unfortunately means that we’ll be shutting down OyaPay products.

If you’ve experienced OyaPay as a customer, thank you for gracing us with your business, for taking a chance on us when others wouldn’t, for speaking with us, for giving us feedback and for generally bearing with us.

We will be making wallet refunds and disbursing merchants balance by 18th of Feb 2019 and shutting down by February.

Onward and upwards.