Cadana, a fintech startup focused on emerging markets, has closed a $7.1 million seed round to streamline and accelerate remittance for African talents. Costanoa Ventures led the round, with participation from Better Tomorrow Ventures and 500 Startups. This brings Cadana’s total funding to $7.4 million since its founding in January 2021, including $325,000 in pre-seed funding.
Co-founded in 2021 by Ghanaian Albert Owusu-Asare (CEO) and Pakistani Ameer Shujjah (CTO), Cadana simplifies payroll for talent marketplaces, staffing companies, and HR providers, enabling payments to workers in over 32 emerging markets, including Nigeria and Ghana. The company says it aims to facilitate access to global job opportunities for talents in Africa and other emerging regions.
Owusu-Asare and Shujjah, who met in college as computer science and physics majors, initially launched Cadana as an earned wage access (EWA) platform targeting specific African markets. However, they soon saw a larger opportunity to address various payroll frictions. Consequently, salary-on-demand service became part of a broader solution offering global payroll software and services to businesses in emerging markets.
“The $1.3 trillion global freelancer market, powered by more than 200 million knowledge workers, drives demand for solutions that automate payroll and streamline employment and tax regulations worldwide,” said Owusu-Asare. “However, the legal hurdles of African and other emerging markets, such as differences in employment laws, make it difficult, if not impossible, for most existing products.”
This challenge forces global hiring platforms to manage local employment laws themselves, adding to the difficulties for remote workers in Africa, who often wait up to a week for their earnings and lose 5-7% in remittance fees.
Cadana’s APIs and white-label products integrate payments and payroll management into existing systems, addressing these problems. “We focused on creating a robust local infrastructure to address these issues. Over the past three years, we’ve integrated local payments, compliance, and benefits systems to serve our customers better and meet their needs,” said Owusu-Asare.
Cadana also offers real-time payments with fees under $3 and options for workers to invest in USD-denominated assets like stocks. Owusu-Asare emphasized the company's dedication to solving payroll issues, noting that “Cadana customers in emerging markets are quite pleased with what we’ve built.”
Cadana's competitors include UAE-based RemotePass, which also focuses on emerging markets. CEO Owusu-Asare argues that Cadana’s competitive advantage is its expertise in streamlining and accelerating remittance for talent in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
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