Fusepay Launches Payments Platform in Seychelles After $350K Pre-Seed

STARTUP VENTURE CAPITALNovember 27, 2025 at 1:18 PM UTC

TLDR

Fusepay, a Seychelles-founded fintech focused on frontier markets, has launched a digital payments platform to help businesses move away from cheque-based and manual processes
The rollout follows a $350,000 pre-seed round in August backed by Hustle Fund, Everywhere Ventures, First Check Ventures, Startup Istanbul, and angel investor Ryan Nesbitt
The startup plans to expand to Mauritius and the Maldives within 18 months and is targeting more than 20 frontier markets

Fusepay, a Seychelles-founded fintech focused on frontier markets, has launched a digital payments platform to help businesses move away from cheque-based and manual processes.

The rollout follows a $350,000 pre-seed round in August backed by Hustle Fund, Everywhere Ventures, First Check Ventures, Startup Istanbul, and angel investor Ryan Nesbitt.

Seychelles’ business payments landscape is still dominated by paper cheques, slowing cash flow and increasing errors. The Central Bank of Seychelles is pushing for a fully digital financial system, and Fusepay’s platform fits into that transition.

With a Payment Service Provider licence and central bank approval, the company offers virtual business accounts, instant transfers, post-dated digital payments to replace cheques, and automated reconciliation. Its API, Fusepay Bridge, enables billers such as utilities and telecoms to collect payments electronically and issue instant receipts.

Founded in 2024 by Vidhyasahar Thiyagarajan and Francesco Rocchi, Fusepay is designed for retailers, wholesalers, and other businesses that still rely on manual payment workflows. Its core product, FuseCheq, earns a 0.6% fee on each digital cheque replacement processed.

The startup plans to expand to Mauritius and the Maldives within 18 months and is targeting more than 20 frontier markets across Africa, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.

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Key Takeaways

Fusepay’s launch illustrates how small island and frontier markets are becoming important testing grounds for digital payments infrastructure. Many of these economies have high business transaction volumes but lack modern financial rails, creating opportunities for specialised B2B fintechs. In Seychelles, a large share of business payments still moves through paper cheques—a system prone to delays, reconciliation problems, and fraud. Fusepay’s digital cheque replacement aims to replicate familiar workflows while shifting them into a regulated digital environment, reducing friction for SMEs that cannot easily adopt global payment tools. The company is also betting on a wider regional shift. Island economies often operate with fragmented banking systems, limited interoperability, and currencies that global processors do not prioritise. By building tools tailored to these conditions, Fusepay is positioning itself to capture markets that remain under-digitised despite high per-business spending. If adoption in Seychelles accelerates, it could provide a template for similar transitions in Mauritius, the Maldives and other frontier markets seeking to modernise their financial systems.

Venture Capital

Startups

Fusepay

Seychelles

Fintech

Digital Payments