TurnStay, a Cape Town-based fintech launched in 2021, processed R1 billion in travel payments during the first six months of 2026, the company announced August 3. The milestone arrives as the startup prepares to pitch a Series A round to investors.
The figure represents an unusually steep growth curve for a company that, as of mid-2025, had processed R250 million in cumulative volume since its founding. Co-founders Alon Stern and James Hedley built TurnStay around a specific arbitrage: African safari lodges and hotels hemorrhage between 7% and 12% of every international booking to payment processing fees, roughly twenty times the rate European merchants pay for identical transactions. TurnStay acts as a merchant of record, routing payments through offshore entities to sidestep those costs, then settling with properties in local currency.
Whether the model scales beyond boutique safari operators remains an open question.
Founders With Payment Scars
Both Stern and Hedley arrived at TurnStay carrying baggage from earlier ventures in payment infrastructure. Stern holds a PhD in mathematics and atmospheric-ocean science from New York University and did postdoctoral work at Princeton before pivoting to fintech. In 2017, he co-founded Slide Financial, a peer-to-peer payments app targeting South Africa's unbanked population. "Technology can make South Africa a more equal country," Stern told Forbes in 2018 while discussing Slide's product design. The startup navigated South Africa's fragmented payment landscape for several years before Stern exited.
Hedley's background sits in ticketing. He co-founded Quicket, an events platform that processed payments for concerts, festivals, and sports events across the continent. Ticketmaster acquired Quicket in July 2024, buying into Hedley's infrastructure for local payment acceptance. By that point, Hedley and Stern had already spent three years building TurnStay.
The Merchant-of-Record Mechanics
The pitch to a safari lodge or boutique hotel chain is straightforward, at least on paper. TurnStay becomes the legal seller on international card transactions, books the payment through its network of European and U.S. entities, and settles with the property at lower net fees. "Global platforms have used this model for years," Stern said in the company's August announcement. "What we've done is bring that same infrastructure to African travel merchants directly."
TurnStay operates through a multi-jurisdiction structure: The Tern Group Inc. incorporated in Delaware, with subsidiaries in Estonia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Namibia. That architecture allows the company to optimize where transactions clear and settle. Payment terms disclose the use of traditional foreign exchange alongside cryptocurrency stablecoin rails for some cross-border settlement, a hybrid approach profiled in an October 2025 ABSA and CV VC African Blockchain Report.
The platform offers checkout pages, payment links, virtual cards, and a developer API. Merchants can accept Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH, and European bank transfers. TurnStay handles chargebacks, manages refunds across currencies, and routes payments through its multi-account structure to minimize declines. The company operates as a licensed financial services provider in South Africa and is pursuing additional international licenses, according to its disclosures.
Volume Growth Accelerates
TurnStay's trajectory bent sharply upward after its August 2025 seed round. When the company closed a $300,000 pre-seed from DFS Lab and Digital Currency Group in July 2024, it had processed R50 million in total volume, Business Day reported. "Securing funding from these US investors is a vote of confidence in our business model," Stern said at the time.
A year later, TurnStay announced a $2 million seed led by First Circle Capital, with participation from TLcom Capital, Enza Capital, Incisive Ventures, CV VC, and Equitable Ventures. Africa Private Equity News covered the round on August 5, 2025, noting the company had processed more than R250 million since the pre-seed. First Circle Capital partner Agnes Aistleitner joined TurnStay's board in mid-2026, according to a LinkedIn post.
The R1 billion figure, representing payments processed in the first half of 2026 alone, suggests the business roughly quadrupled in under a year. TurnStay's website now displays "1 Billion+ Processed" and "50k+ Transactions" on its homepage, though the company has not disclosed what portion of that volume converts to revenue or what its actual take rate averages across customers.
Customer names offer some clues about market penetration. Safari.com, an online booking platform for African safaris, lists TurnStay in its published terms and conditions as the operator for card transactions, with payments routed through Peach Payments for South African rand and Stripe for international currencies. The Capital Hotels, a luxury South African hotel group, similarly references TurnStay in its booking terms. The company has published case studies for Singita, Thornybush, and Londolozi, three high-end safari lodge brands.
"Turnstay have streamlined our payment processing operation, decreased the payment failure rate, and saved us money with lower fees," a Thornybush finance director wrote in a testimonial on the company's site. The wording is promotional, but the basic claim aligns with what other merchants have told industry publications.
The Cost Differential
The economics TurnStay exploits are notable. Business Day reported in July 2024 that a booking processed through a European payment gateway might cost a merchant 0.3%, while the same transaction billed locally in South Africa can exceed 7%. COO James Hedley told the publication that "the average merchant spends 12% of revenue on getting paid," a drag that "dramatically affects the viability of many businesses in a sector that employs more than six million people in Africa."
TurnStay markets a 1.6% fee for accepting euro or dollar cards on its safari lodges landing page, alongside promises of 48-hour revenue access. The pricing page includes a fee calculator but does not publish a standard rate card. The company claims merchants can "reduce booking fees by up to 70%" and "boost checkout success rate by 50%+," attributing those figures to its own platform data.
PhocusWire, a travel industry publication, covered the seed round in August 2025, quoting Stern on the value proposition: "We've built our business around closing that gap, and the traction we are getting tells us the model works and merchants value it."
Series A Ahead
TurnStay was a top-10 finalist for Innovation City Cape Town's Startup of the Year 2026, competing in a May 14 finale alongside nine other ventures. The prize pool included R500,000 in equity-free funding. Another startup, still good, won the award, according to Innovation City's announcement.
The company said it is preparing for a Series A but declined to disclose target size, timeline, or lead conversations. First Circle Capital, TLcom, and Enza have each backed African fintech companies at later stages, giving TurnStay a plausible path to follow-on capital. The company's volume growth provides a clear metric to pitch, though investors will likely press on unit economics and churn.
"The less merchants pay in fees, the more money stays in Africa," Stern said in the August announcement, framing the merchant-of-record model as infrastructure arbitrage with a regional development angle. Whether that narrative translates to Series A terms will hinge on how much of that R1 billion in volume converts to sustainable revenue and whether the startup can defend its fee advantage as it scales. Processing volume is one thing; capturing margin at scale is another.
