Flutterwave halts Disha's closure with an acquisition

Flutterwave has acquired Disha in an undisclosed deal.

In February, Disha — an online no-code tool that allows digital creators to curate, sell their digital content, create portfolios and receive payments announced that it will shut down its service on December 31, 2022.

However, Disha's later stated that "we are currently considering new options for our company and will share an update as soon as we have made a resolution".

Olugbenga Agboola, the founder of African focused fintech company, Flutterwave on Wednesday announced that Africa's fourth unicorn has acquired Disha in an undisclosed deal via a tweet.

What now?

With this acquisition, Flutterwave has integrated payments into Disha to enable over 20,000 users across the globe to efficiently receive payments through their Disha accounts. It will also see the fintech company's expansion into $100 billion creator economy that is set to shape big tech.

The economy received tremendous growth during the pandemic spurring tech companies to design platforms and strategies to engage users amid an explosion of new social apps like Clubhouse and TikTok.

Rufus Oyemade, c0-founder and CTO at Disha told TechCrunch that, "We [the founders] decided to shut down the company because we ran out of resources to continue driving the very valid vision we had. With Flutterwave, we now have a way to drive both value for creators and revenue to sustain the business. We are happy to have gotten the call from Flutterwave, which actually kept hopes alive".

Rufus will still lead the technology behind Disha as a software and architectural lead at Flutterwave.

Disha's background

Founded in 2019 by executives of Cregital; Evans Akanno and Rufus Oyemade, alongside Blessing Abeng, who came in as the Chief Marketing Officer in February 2020.

Disha experienced huge traction with massive fan (user) love within their one-year-plus of operation — with Disha links in the Twitter bio of most Nigerian digital creators.

Per TechCrunch, although Disha had users globally, its revenues were low, making slightly above $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue. With little revenues and limited resources, Disha showed signs of struggle; even the ex-CEO attested to this in a now-deleted LinkedIn post where he expressed burnout while running Disha and Cregital, a design agency he founded and was CEO, a role he stepped down from in September.