TurnStay has processed more than R1bn in payments for African travel businesses in the first six months of 2026. The Cape Town fintech builds payment infrastructure for hotels, safari lodges, tour operators and villa agencies, with clients including Singita, Londolozi, Safari.com and The Capital.
Where local processing of a foreign booking can cost a merchant as much as 8% of the transaction, TurnStay says its clients pay from around 1.6%. The company is now preparing a Series A raise.
Interesting insights on TurnStay travel payments
The compounding is the story: TurnStay had processed about R50m by mid-2024 after a $300,000 pre-seed from DFS Lab and Digital Currency Group, R250m by the time it raised a $2m seed in August 2025, and now R1bn in half a year. That seed was led by First Circle Capital with TLcom Capital, Enza Capital, Incisive Ventures, CVVC and Equitable Ventures alongside.
The mechanism is a merchant-of-record structure plus payment orchestration: the card gets charged in the traveller's own country, then funds settle locally using stablecoins.
Co-founder Alon Stern came out of Prodigy Finance, and James Hedley co-founded Quicket, which Ticketmaster bought.
What others are saying about TurnStay travel payments
TechFinancials reported the milestone and the Series A plans. Disrupt Africa framed the model as borrowing the tricks the world's biggest booking companies already use, while IT-Online notes the approach also cuts failed international transactions and settlement delays.
The margin was always the product
None of this is new technology. Merchant-of-record is what Booking.com and Airbnb have run for years, and stablecoin settlement is just a cheaper rail. The actual insight was noticing that a Kruger lodge pays several times what a European competitor pays for identical work, and that nobody had bothered to arbitrage it.
That is a repeatable template for SA founders: the opening is often not novel capability but existing capability nobody pointed at this market. The caveat is that fee arbitrage compresses. The day a global PSP decides African travel is worth the integration effort, 1.6% becomes the floor, and TurnStay has to be more than cheap.
Presumably that is what the Series A buys.
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