One of the winners of the Mozilla Africa Innovation Challenge, which was hosted in Nairobi, Kenya, was Payd, a fintech firm that offers a payment platform geared towards independent contractors and creatives.

The Mozilla Africa Mradi Innovation Challenge’s main goal is to honour creative approaches to persistent problems in Africa that make use of technology to improve society.

In the competition, there were two tracks:

The educational track
the early stage track
Payd took part in the startup track and successfully advanced to the competition’s final stages.

The firm, co-founded by Japheth Achimba and Benaiah Wepundi, both graduates of the Power Learn Project, an organisation with a mission to provide adolescents in Africa with affordable and accessible tech training, succeeded to win over the judges with their offering.

Their solution addresses a number of difficulties faced by independent contractors, including:

delayed or unpaid invoices from clients,
the demand for customised payment processes
Redundant invoicing procedures, manual receipting, and a lack of efficient financial tracking and planning
The ability of Payd to simplify payment processes, enhance financial management, and let freelancers to efficiently manage their revenues set them apart and ultimately helped them get the award of KES 4 million ($27,529.25).

This grant consists of a KES 3.5 million ($24,088.09) milestone-based sum and an extra Ksh 500,000 ($3,441.16) set out for technical support. The money will be used to advance the creation of their creative payment platform.

Payd’s co-founder, Japheth, said: “We are delighted and honoured to have Payd recognised in the Mozilla Africa Mradi Innovation Challenge.

“Our experience as freelancers motivated us to develop a solution that addresses the problems that many people in the sector encounter. With the help of this grant, we will be able to develop Payd more quickly and give freelancers and creatives the tools they need to succeed in their careers.

PayD is a cutting-edge solution that caters to this expanding userbase because it is estimated that there are more than 1.2 million online freelancers in Kenya and more than 80 million across Africa.