Kenyan HR Startup, Workpay, Has Raised $2.1 M Seed Funding – Here’s the Details

Kenyan HR startup, WorkPay, has raised $2.1 million seed funding led by Kepple Africa Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Musha Ventures, P1 Ventures, and other angel investors.

The company says that the seed funding will be “to scale our human resource management and payroll processing tools to SMBs and expand to enterprise clients across East Africa.”

“We are fortunate to have the backing of some incredible people on our mission to make it easy for businesses to manage and pay employees across Africa,” said Paul Kimani, chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder of WorkPay.

Established in 2017 as TozzaPlus by Paul Kimani and Jackson Kibigo, WorkPay is a cloud-based solution that attends to HR management, payroll processing and secure salary disbursement.

In 2018, the company changed its focus to its human resource management (HRM) software, subsequently rebranding to WorkPay.

WorkPay has previously secured Sh. 5.4 M ($50,000) funding from Norwegian accelerator, Pangea Funds (2018), and Sh. 10.8m ($100,000) from Japanese-based VC firm, Kepple Africa (2019). The general partner of Kepple Africa Ventures, Ryosuke Yamawaki, said that the WorkPay team is different in the way they define their customers, understand their pain and design solutions.

Kimani further adds that it is no surprise the company has come this far and that it will become one of the most successful starts ups in the continent and drastically change the way the workforce is managed.

WorkPay currently has more than 300 small and medium scale businesses as clients and processes payrolls for more than 25,000 employees in Kenya.