South African startup Rafiki, a work and payments OS that makes subcontracting and collaboration across borders seamless, has spun out its fintech arm as a separate company – Petl Pay.
Founded by Greg Cooke and Nicolas Boswell in 2023, Rafiki began life as a freelance marketplace, but quickly evolved into curated “hit squads” of senior freelance and fractional talent, and then into today’s OS for running global teams.
The platform allows agencies and freelancers to raise one consolidated invoice and instantly pay out multiple subcontractors anywhere in the world, solving a major pain point in service-based work.
“Unlike other embedded finance or invoicing platforms, we’ve focussed on multi-party, collaborative invoicing and the associated flow of funds, saving significant time and cost associated with outdated workflows and invoicing we’d previously accepted,” Cooke told Disrupt Africa in September of last year.
Rafiki offers multi-party invoicing and collaborative payments, and affordable cross-border transfers, including free instant transfers between Rafiki wallets anywhere in the world. Fiat and stablecoin payouts are built into invoicing.
It has now spun its payments arm – Petl Pay – out of Rafiki Works after spending the last two years running real projects with distributed teams across Africa, the UK, EU, and the US, and is doubling down on payments orchestration for project-based teams.
“We kept running into the same inefficiencies – the way work is executed today is modular and project-based, but the financial infrastructure underneath it is still built for one-to-one employment, payroll cycles, and static organisations. Agencies, contractors, and collaborators are forced to stitch together time tracking, invoicing, clunky and expensive 1:1 bank transfers, payroll tools, and spreadsheets just to get paid correctly,” Cooke said.
“Petl Pay sits at the convergence of HR tech and fintech, but in a very practical way. It orchestrates collaborative workflows into consolidated invoices and split payments, so one client payment can be routed cleanly to many contributors across borders. We continue to integrate with regulated payment providers, combining both fiat and stablecoin rails to make settlement faster and more transparent, without taking custody of funds.”
The startup is currently in private beta, focused on US, UK, and EU to Southern Africa corridors, and actively expanding partnerships across Africa and Europe. Rafiki Works continues as a services and talent platform, while Petl Pay is now a standalone fintech product.
