Kora operates a pan-African payment infrastructure that connects businesses across fragmented financial systems. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Toronto, the company operates across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Cameroon, Egypt, and Ivory Coast, providing APIs and a payment engine for cross-border digital payments, currency conversion, identity verification, and multiple payment method processing.
The technical surface area spans payments infrastructure, card and bank transfer processing, mobile money integration, and compliance-heavy domains including PCI DSS v4.0, ISO 27001:2013, and ISO 22301:2019 certification. The infrastructure handles real money across multiple jurisdictions with varying regulatory regimes and currency controls - the kind of system where a routing bug or failed settlement can lock up capital across borders, and where compliance drift creates legal exposure across seven countries simultaneously.
Kora serves digital banks, e-commerce platforms, healthcare providers, logistics companies, and both local merchants and global companies entering African markets. The company's core product suite includes a payment engine exposing APIs for collections and disbursements, integrations with cards and bank transfers, and identity verification capabilities. The expansion from single-market to pan-African coverage reflects both market opportunity and technical complexity: building once and scaling across markets with different payment rails, FX dynamics, and regulatory requirements.
