Cactus Capital, the investment arm of Cactus Advisors, has announced investments into seed and growth stage African tech ventures, Flutterwave and E-Factor.

Zach George, Cactus Advisors’ founder and CEO, said the company was excited to be investing in pioneering fintech companies that had graduated from leading accelerator programs worldwide.

Flutterwave is a San Francisco-based team of African entrepreneurs, financial services technologists and mobile payment experts that provides end-to-end payments technology and infrastructure, which enables payment service providers, global merchants, licensed money transfer operators and pan-African banks to process payments to and from Africa with one API integration.

They are a graduate of the prestigious Y-Combinator Accelerator in Silicon Valley whose graduates have included companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Eventbrite, and Instacart, amongst several others.

Rather than implement separate integrations for card schemes, mobile money networks, e-wallet and bank account payments across Africa, Flutterwave’s clients can leverage one API integration to ensure end users can pay and get paid anywhere across Africa.

Flutterwave has processed over $20m in transactions to date for clients that include Uber, Paystack, Page Microfinance Bank, and Access Bank.

E-Factor is a South African-based fintech company that has created a digital factoring platform where companies can sell their receivable invoices through an auction to investors with the highest bid.

By investing in these invoices, investors obtain new short-term investment instruments with low-risk returns. Compared to banks, the E-Factor solution is quick, flexible and favorable.

E-Factor doesn’t limit companies contractually or analyze financials, or do any credit decisions.

A company can sell its invoices just when a quick working capital arises.

E-Factor (formerly called InvoiceXchange) was a graduate of the Barclays Tech Lab Africa Accelerator, the first ever corporate accelerator program run on the African continent, which was run and managed by Cactus Advisors.

Earlier this year, Cactus Capital backed Ugandan-based mobile payment aggregator, Intel World International.

George said: “As Cactus Advisors, simply investing into high growth, high impact tech-enabled ventures on the continent is not good enough, unless we critically have the right enabling environment on the continent for tech startups to access markets, channel partners and customers.”

“Corporate Africa with its powerful consortium of financial services firms, retailers, telecommunication firms, insurance companies and media houses – all of whom are yet to seriously tap into the innovation pipeline that tech startups offer – provides the ideal platform for commercializing proof-of-concept agreements with startups that serves as a perfect risk mitigation shield to investors looking for returns in the African venture capital sector,” he said.