Africa’s soaring population of social media users and online shoppers has accelerated the rise of social commerce, an ecosystem where buying and selling happen inside chat apps rather than traditional e-commerce platforms. Nigerian startup Vendy is one of the most ambitious entrants attempting to power this shift.
Founded in 2022 by Kayode Disu and Peter Ekunkoya, the Y Combinator–backed company wants to become the de facto payment infrastructure for Africa’s social commerce economy, beginning on WhatsApp before expanding to any chat interface where transactions occur.
While Vendy currently presents as a WhatsApp storefront with catalogues, carts, and a clean shopping interface, its long-term ambition goes far beyond enabling sellers to showcase items.
“The infrastructure for chat-based commerce in Africa is still missing,” said Kayode Disu, Vendy’s CEO. “We’re building the UPI for Africa starting on WhatsApp.”
What You Should Know
Through Vendy, merchants can easily create eye-catching catalogues complete with product descriptions, images, and pricing. Buyers, in turn, enjoy a familiar e-commerce-like experience including keyword search, browsing, carting, and checkout, all executed within an overlay inside WhatsApp, without opening a browser or a separate app.
On the payments end, Vendy integrates directly with major African banking and mobile money providers including Sterling, Kuda, Opay, FCMB, Momo, and First Bank, allowing users to pay instantly from linked accounts.
Yet for Vendy, the storefront is merely the gateway. What the startup considers its true moat lies beneath the interface.
Unlike most competitors, Vendy’s core innovation is a device-level payment widget. It does not live inside WhatsApp, but beside it, an intentional design that makes the company independent of WhatsApp’s internal payment restrictions.
When buyers tap “Pay” inside a Vendy-powered storefront, the widget launches instantly, showing payment options from bank accounts, mobile wallets, cards or mobile money. No sign-ups, no app installs, no external redirects.
Vendy’s business model combines a flat 1% transaction fee with tiered SaaS plans ranging from free to $200 per month.
Why Vendy Believes It Can Win
Competitors such as Owo by Mono, Chpter in Kenya, Xara, and Catlog each take different approaches to social commerce and P2P payments. But Vendy argues that they are either too consumer-first, reliant on web redirects, and dependent on third-party processors
Vendy has instead built its own regulated payments processor, certified by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), PCI DSS compliant, NDPR compliant, and notably a Meta-approved WhatsApp Business Solution Provider (BSP).
Disu said this deep alignment allows Vendy to offer features others cannot, including:
- Branded WhatsApp storefronts
- Omnichannel reach across Telegram, Instagram, and AI tools like Lua
- A developer ecosystem for third-party bots and vertical apps to plug directly into its payment widget
Ultimately, Vendy wants to be everywhere commerce happens, but never fully seen.
Becoming Meta’s Payments Partner in Africa
According to Disu, Vendy’s long-term bet is strategic. When Meta or another major platform eventually scales payments across Africa, they will require licensed, continent-savvy partners who already understand the infrastructure. Vendy intends to be on that shortlist.
Its strategy mirrors earlier fintech success stories:
- Stripe started with developers
- Paystack focused on merchants
- Wave mastered mobile wallets
Vendy is targeting their intersection, including chat-first, mobile-native payment rail infrastructure.
Vendy does not want consumers to think of it as another fintech app. Instead, it wants to become the default way to pay whenever a buyer makes a purchase from a WhatsApp, Instagram, or Telegram vendor.
Its vision is to be the invisible payment layer powering Africa’s next billion chat-based transactions.
Talking Points
Vendy’s decision to build a device-level payment widget, rather than relying solely on WhatsApp’s internal systems is a significant technical advantage, especially in a region where platform restrictions often slow innovation.
This approach positions Vendy as a resilient and flexible payment layer for Africa’s fast-growing social commerce economy, ensuring that transactions can still flow even when platforms impose limitations or introduce policy changes.
At Techparley, we’ve observed how social commerce continues to outpace traditional e-commerce, particularly among micro-retailers, informal merchants, and WhatsApp-first sellers who rely heavily on chat-based transactions.
By integrating bank accounts, mobile wallets, and mobile money providers directly into its infrastructure, Vendy is offering merchants and buyers a unified payment experience that mirrors what global players deliver, without leaving the chat interface.
As Vendy scales, we see a major opportunity in partnerships with banks, telecom operators, logistics providers, and developer ecosystems that could accelerate merchant adoption and embed the widget across the continent’s most active digital communities.
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