How SA’s Rafiki makes subcontracting and collaboration across borders seamless

South African startup Rafiki is a work and payments OS that makes subcontracting and collaboration across borders seamless. Founded by Greg Cooke and Nicolas Boswell in 2023, Rafiki began life as a freelance marketplace, but quickly evolved into curated “hit squads” of senior freelance and fractional talent, and then into today’s OS for running global teams. The platform allows agencies and freelancers to raise one consolidated invoice and instantly pay out multiple subcontractors anywhere in the world, solving a major pain point in service-based work. “Unlike other embedded finance or invoicing platforms, we’ve focussed on multi-party, collaborative invoicing and the associated flow of funds, saving significant time and cost associated with outdated workflows and invoicing we’d previously accepted,” Cooke told Disrupt Africa. Rafiki offers multi-party invoicing and collaborative payments, and affordable cross-border transfers, including free instant transfers between Rafiki wallets anywhere in the world. Fiat and stablecoin payouts are built into invoicing. “Alongside payments, Rafiki embeds a community of vetted, senior freelancers and micro-agencies from Africa into the OS. This makes scaling teams, subcontracting, and collaborating globally far easier, faster, and more trusted,” said Cooke. The main gap the startup is trying to fill is in subcontracting workflows, and the lack of purpose-built invoicing solutions for this new way of work. “Agencies and startups working internationally struggle with messy invoicing, delayed payments, and high fees. No other platform offers multi-party collaborative invoicing embedded with smart payments in the way we do,” said Cooke. By embedding stablecoins into invoicing and designing for collaboration and subcontracting, Rafiki fills a niche that competitors like Payoneer, Wise, or Deel don’t address. “We’re especially focused on South African agencies serving US, EU, and UK clients, where smooth subcontracting and affordable payouts are game-changing. We’re seeing a growing demand and shift towards subcontracting of smaller agencies, freelance and fractional talent, particularly between the US/EU and South Africa, and the US/LatAm corridors,” Cooke said. Rafiki is funded via a combination of accelerators, angel investors, and equity-free grants. “Shoutout to Baobab Network, Jobtech Alliance, CVLabs, alongside our strategic angels,” Cooke said. “We’re fortunate enough to have strong revenue and a growing pipeline, meaning to-date we’ve not been reliant on larger VC funding. That said, we’re now confident that taking on VC funding is the right decision, and as such will be raising a pre-seed round starting this September.” The startup is currently in private beta with around 20 agencies, startups, and freelancers in the US, UK, EU, South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria. “What we’re building is complex, so it’s been important that we iterate quickly on real-time feedback from users actually sending and receiving multi-party invoices across borders. We’ll be opening a new cohort of users in November and have a growing waitlist of agencies and individuals eager to join,” said Cooke. “We’re working towards a public launch in Q1 2026, but for now invite agencies, startups, and freelancers to get in touch to form part of the next private cohort.” The post How SA’s Rafiki makes subcontracting and collaboration across borders seamless appeared first on Disrupt Africa .