Rafiki is a South African platform positioning itself to unify project workflows and settlement combining multi-party invoicing, collaborative payments, and affordable cross-border transfers.
Rafiki (site) is a South African “work and payments OS” designed to make subcontracting and collaboration across borders seamless. The positioning focuses on bringing project coordination and payment execution into a single workflow to reduce friction in multi-country work.
Friction-Free Services
Launched in 2023 by Greg Cooke and Nicolas Boswell, Rafiki evolved from a freelance marketplace into curated lists of senior and fractional talent, before becoming an OS designed for global teams.
“Unlike other embedded finance or invoicing platforms, we’ve focused 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multi-party, collaborative invoicing and the associated flow of funds, saving significant time and cost associated with outdated workflows and invoicing we’d previously accepted,” Cooke told Disrupt Africa. “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,” he said.
Rafiki brings together multi-party invoicing and collaborative payments within the same environment. Alongside these tools, the platform emphasizes affordable cross-border transfers, aimed at aligning delivery, approval, and settlement.
The Challenges of Cross Border Projects
Cross-border projects often involve multiple stakeholders, staggered deliverables, and complex payout structures. By combining invoicing and disbursement in one place, the proposition targets common bottlenecks in subcontracting, namely fragmented tools and costly transfers, so that teams can coordinate contributions and settle payments with clearer accountability.
Rafiki’s services present useful tools for companies and independent professionals who frequently assemble distributed teams across markets. Typical scenarios include multi-vendor projects, agency-contractor arrangements, and collaborative builds that require milestone-based invoices and shared payouts, all while managing international transfers.
Supporting Collaborative Arrangements
Rafiki’s value proposition centers on integrating work coordination and payments for cross-border subcontracting. By foregrounding multi-party invoicing, collaborative payments, and affordable transfers, the platform seeks to streamline how distributed teams manage tasks and settle funds.
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