Our investment in Waffo - Building the Global Monetisation Layer for Digital-First Businesses

Today, we’re excited to announce our investment in Waffo’s Series A+ round, which totals over US$15 million. Illuminate Financial co-led the round alongside Gaorong Capital, with continued support from BAI Capital and HSBC.

Waffo is building what we believe will become a foundational layer for the internet economy: global monetisation infrastructure that helps digital native businesses turn international demand into revenue without having to rebuild payments, localisation, and settlement country by country.

In a world where products and services can reach customers anywhere, getting paid should be the easy part. In reality, global monetisation is still defined by fragmented payment methods, inconsistent success rates, and the operational complexity of supporting different checkout expectations market by market. Waffo’s mission is straightforward: help fast growing teams scale revenue globally while staying focused on product.

Demand Is Global, Payments Are Not

Distribution is global by default. Monetisation is not.

Over the last decade, digital payments have switched from an alternative to the default. What began as a card-centric internet has evolved into a wallet-led and account based ecosystem, particularly in e-commerce. This shift is not slowing down.

Worldpay’s data shows digital payments growing from a minority of transactions a decade ago to the clear majority today, with further expansion expected over the next several years. This reflects a structural change in how consumers pay, driven by wallets, local schemes, and real time rails becoming the primary interface for commerce.

But the story does not end with growth.

As digital payments become the default, the ecosystem underneath is becoming more fragmented, not less.

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While consumers everywhere are paying digitally, they are not paying in the same way. Each region has developed its own dominant wallets, bank transfer schemes, and local rails. Even within a single geography, multiple methods are often required to reach meaningful coverage.

For global first businesses, this creates a new bottleneck. Demand may be universal, but conversion is local. Winning a market increasingly depends on supporting the exact payment methods customers already trust in that region. This is the gap Waffo is built to address.

The Hidden Cost of Fragmentation: Growth Slows at the Checkout

The most successful digital businesses today expand faster than their infrastructure.

What starts as “just add another country” quickly turns into:

• Multiple local payment integrations across regions
• Inconsistent checkout experiences and lower conversion rates
• Duplicated operational effort across engineering, finance, and product
• Complex routing logic (what works in one market fails in another)
• Settlement complexity across currencies and providers
• Market specific tax calculation, invoicing, and reporting requirements that scale with revenue, not headcount

As businesses expand, payment fragmentation and tax complexity compound together, increasing operational burden across finance, legal, and engineering teams.

The net effect is subtle but painful: revenue leakage. Not because customers aren’t interested, but because the monetisation stack isn’t tuned for how they prefer to pay.

Why Waffo

Waffo stood out to us because they’re addressing monetisation at the right abstraction layer: not a single payment integration, but a unified global monetisation platform designed to make localisation and payment acceptance feel seamless across markets.

1) A single platform built for global coverage

Waffo is API driven and built for scale, supporting 50+ regions, 70+ currencies, and more than 430 payment methods.

That matters because local payment coverage is not a nice to have. In many markets, it is the difference between a great product that does not convert and one that does.

2) Monetisation built around how digital businesses actually grow

Waffo positions itself as more than a checkout. Their product suite spans core monetisation workflows including:

• Checkout
• Subscription billing
• Invoicing
• Success rate optimisation
• Fraud protection
• Local compliance and tax

This reflects how modern businesses monetise today, across subscriptions, usage-based pricing, digital goods, and B2B/B2C hybrids.

3) Strong positioning in high-growth, complex markets

Waffo emphasizes breadth across regions where monetisation fragmentation is highest, and where local payment methods can be decisive for acquisition and retention.

We believe this focus is strategically important: global growth is increasingly driven by markets where a “card-only” approach simply doesn’t work.

Why Now: Alternative Rails Are No Longer Niche

The global payments ecosystem is shifting quickly. The rise of account-to-account and instant payment systems in key markets, alongside continued growth in wallets, highlighting how rapidly payment behaviour is changing worldwide.

As digital businesses expand, they need infrastructure that can keep pace with:

• Evolving payment preferences
• New rails and real-time schemes
• Higher expectations for checkout localisation
• Increasing sensitivity to fraud and failure rates
• Higher operational scrutiny as revenue scales

Waffo is built for that reality: helping businesses launch into new markets faster, convert better, and stay focused on growth.

The Team

In our experience, the most enduring infrastructure companies are built by teams who have operated at scale in complex environments before.

Waffo’s leadership team brings deep, directly relevant experience from Ant Group, Alipay, WorldFirst, and PayPal, with prior responsibility for scaling global payment infrastructure, risk, and compliance across APAC and other emerging markets. The team has led international expansion efforts, built core payment architecture, and managed regulatory and risk challenges in some of the most fragmented payment ecosystems globally.

We believe this combination of technical capability, regional execution, and operational experience is a key reason Waffo is moving quickly in a category that is difficult to get right.

Looking Ahead

We believe Waffo is building what modern digital businesses increasingly need: a global monetisation layer that scales as fast as distribution.

As partners, we’re excited to support Waffo as they continue to expand coverage, deepen product capabilities, and become the default choice for global-first companies that want to grow without rebuilding the monetisation stack every time they enter a new market.

We are looking forward to working closely with the Waffo team as they scale globally.