Seychelles-headquartered fintech Fusepay has launched Fuse360, an AI-native operating system built for wholesalers, distributors and manufacturers — moving the company beyond its payments roots into enterprise software territory that African fintechs are now increasingly contesting.
The Fuse360 platform, which launched in Seychelles in July and is scheduled to enter Mauritius in September before selected East and Southern African markets later this year, combines inventory management, order processing, invoicing, customer credit, collections and retailer relationships into a single workflow. Payments run through FusePay — the company’s existing payments product — so businesses can manage operations and financial transactions inside the same ecosystem, with invoices, payments, collections, customer balances and supplier records synchronized automatically across the two platforms.
The launch is Fusepay’s most significant product move in the eight months since it launched its digital payments platform in Seychelles and raised $350,000 in pre-seed funding in August 2025. It also lines up with a broader Seychelles positioning: the country ranked among Africa’s top three in Oxford Insights’ 2020 Government AI Readiness Index, and has been pursuing early AI adoption at both government and private-sector layers.
Fusepay co-founder and chief executive Vidhyasahar Thiyagarajan framed the product in explicitly anti-ERP terms. “We didn’t build Fuse360 because the world needed another ERP,” he said, arguing that too many trade businesses spend more time managing disconnected systems than growing them. The AI opportunity, in his framing, is the chance to rethink how trade businesses should operate from the ground up rather than to layer intelligent features on top of a legacy operating stack.
The AI substance of Fuse360 sits in a set of embedded agents that assist both front-office and back-office teams — automating payment reconciliation, collections, reporting, customer credit monitoring and operational analysis. Because the agents operate inside the platform itself rather than as external integrations, they have direct access to invoices, inventory movements, payment histories and supplier relationships, and can generate recommendations and automate workflows without requiring employees to move data between multiple applications. The platform also includes a retailer portal where businesses can place orders, access invoices, download statements, review outstanding balances and communicate directly with suppliers, alongside Know Your Business (KYB) and Know Your Customer (KYC) onboarding and AI-powered credit intelligence that analyzes payment behaviour, outstanding exposure and historical payment patterns.
The market opportunity Fusepay is playing for is large by any measure. Africa is home to an estimated 244 million businesses, according to figures Fusepay cited, and merchandise trade across the continent reached $1.5 trillion in 2024. As the African Continental Free Trade Area deepens cross-border commercial activity, adoption of digital tools that combine operations and payments — the Fuse360 wedge — is expected to widen.
The competitive landscape Fusepay names in its launch briefing is a useful map of the field it is entering. On the global side sit Odoo and SAP Business One, both of which have long-established African channel partners and enterprise sales infrastructure. On the African side, Bumpa and Sabi already serve merchants and distributors with software that is closer to Fuse360’s target segment. Fusepay’s own positioning against that field rests on being purpose-built for trade businesses — wholesalers, distributors, manufacturers and their retailer and hospitality networks — rather than adapting a general-purpose ERP for the same use cases.
The strategic template is one iAfrica has been watching land across the continent’s fintech ecosystem in real time. Yoco acquired Dyner in June — an AI-native operating system built for restaurants and independent businesses — in the same fintech-extends-beyond-payments-into-AI-operations pattern that Fusepay is now executing in the Indian Ocean and East Africa. Yoco followed the acquisition weeks later with the launch of Yoco AI, its own AI business agent for South African small businesses. Paystack launched its AI-agent checkout Index in Nigeria the same month, letting users pay through Claude, ChatGPT and OpenClaw. Fusepay’s positioning as an AI-native financial operating system for trade businesses sits inside the same architectural bet: that payments alone are no longer a sufficient wedge, and that AI-native operations layered on top of a payments core is where the sustainable value now sits.
Whether Fusepay converts its Seychelles launch and $350K pre-seed backing into meaningful traction across the more competitive Mauritian and East African markets it is next targeting will depend on execution against incumbents that have visibly more capital, more market presence and, in Yoco’s case, a proven acquisition-based playbook for extending the AI operations layer. But the strategic move — extending from payments into operations, with AI agents inside the operations layer rather than bolted onto it — is where a growing set of African fintechs now sees the next phase of value creation.
