Fusepay, a Seychelles-founded fintech building payment tools for frontier markets, has launched its digital payment platform to help businesses in the East African country manage their finances and shift from slow, paper-based processes.
The rollout follows its $350,000 pre-seed funding round in August, led by Hustle Fund, with participation from Everywhere Ventures, First Check Ventures, Startup Istanbul, and angel investor Ryan Nesbitt.
Seychelles’ business payment system is dominated by cheques and manual processes that slow cash flow and create errors. As part of its push for digital governance, the Central Bank of Seychelles is driving a nationwide shift toward a fully digital financial system to reduce reliance on physical cash. Fusepay’s entry provides businesses with an opportunity in the country’s shift toward digital finance.
Backed by a Payment Service Provider (PSP) licence and approval from the Central Bank of Seychelles, Fusepay is built exclusively for businesses, including retailers, wholesalers, and billers, offering virtual business accounts, instant transfers, post-dated digital payments to replace paper cheques, and automated reconciliation for accounting teams. Its API, Fusepay Bridge, enables billers, including utilities, telecoms, and government agencies, to collect payments electronically and issue instant digital receipts.
The company was founded in June 2024 by Vidhyasahar Thiyagarajan (CEO) and Francesco Rocchi (CTO), who grew up helping their families run retail and wholesale operations in Seychelles. They said firsthand experience with manual payment processes, including cheques, informed the design of the platform.
Fusepay is targeting high-spending island economies with weak digital payment infrastructure and uncommon currencies. Thiyagarajan said the company is eyeing more than 20 frontier markets across the African and Indian Ocean islands, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, which he described as a total addressable market (TAM) of around $25 billion.
Fusepay’s core revenue stream comes from its key product, FuseCheq, its digital replacement for traditional paper cheques used in B2B payments, earning a 0.6% fee on every transaction.
Thiyagarajan said businesses in Seychelles have long relied on outdated payment processes, including paper cheques and slow manual processes, systems that are now being phased out by government directives. He added that the company plans to expand to Mauritius and the Maldives within the next 18 months.
“The time wasted and the losses caused by outdated systems are real,” he said. “Manual processes made employee fraud far too easy, and we have seen businesses shut down because of it. We built Fusepay to give businesses a faster, safer, and more transparent way to operate.”
Fusepay says it has no direct fintech competitors in Seychelles focused on B2B digital payments. Instead, the company considers legacy internet banking portals and the paper cheque systems used by local banks as its main competition.
Beyond payments, Fusepay is also developing an integrated inventory and order management system designed to streamline operations for small and medium-sized businesses and address the challenges in juggling multiple tools to manage business finances.
While Seychelles is its first market, the company plans to expand to other underserved Indian Ocean islands and frontier markets with similar payment infrastructure gaps.
“Frontier markets like Seychelles need technology built for their context,” said Rocchi. “ Our goal is to modernise payments from the ground up so businesses can operate with confidence and clarity.”
Investors say the opportunity is significant, given the scale of business transactions still tied to legacy systems. Scott Hartley, co-founder and Managing Partner at Everywhere Ventures, said the team identified “billions of dollars in business transactions that need to be modernised” across the region.
