Route Money

Route was born from firsthand experience with the operational challenges hospitality businesses face across Africa. Before founding Route, Emmanuel Miriti built and scaled a hospitality and leisure platform across five African markets before its acquisition. During that journey, he saw businesses struggle with fragmented systems for payments, delivery, loyalty, marketing, and customer engagement — while lacking ownership of their customer relationships and spending heavily to reacquire customers. What started as an effort to solve these inefficiencies evolved into a broader vision: building the fintech and commerce infrastructure powering hospitality businesses across emerging markets. Today, Route helps restaurants, bars, cafes, cloud kitchens, and quick-service businesses manage payments, cashback rewards, loyalty, customer engagement, online ordering, and storefronts from one integrated platform. By combining fintech infrastructure with customer data and retention tools, Route enables businesses to increase repeat purchases, improve customer lifetime value, and grow sustainably. What makes our team unique is our proximity to the problem. We have lived the operational realities of hospitality businesses in Africa. Our CTO, Ian Bwana, leads an in-house engineering team building scalable fintech and commerce infrastructure designed specifically for African markets and consumer behavior. Today, Route powers over **740 paying businesses**, processes more than **$584K in monthly GTV**, generates **$34K in monthly revenue**, and continues to grow at **10% month-over-month**. Our mission is bigger than software. We believe small and mid-sized businesses deserve the same access to data, retention tools, and financial infrastructure that large enterprises use to scale. As digital payments and AI reshape commerce globally, Route is positioning itself to become the operating and financial layer powering hospitality businesses across Africa and MENA.

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