The mergers and acquisitions (M&A) machine may have reduced its intensity in announcing new deals, after a great start to the year with the Flutterwave-Mono deal.Â
However, Yoco, the South African technology company and former M&A machine, is finding its footing again.
On Thursday, it acquired Dyner AI for an undisclosed amount; given how quiet the ecosystem was about it, it is likely a small deal, but a needed one, however.
Yoco’s last acquisition before this was Nona Digital, a fintech and Web3 software development agency, in March 2022, its third and largest acquisition at the time, following Cobi Interactive in 2019 and Dado in 2021. After that flurry, the M&A activity stopped.Â
The reasons were not hard to read: the funding environment tightened globally after 2022, startup valuations came under pressure, and Yoco itself went through a leadership transition. Founding CEO Katlego Maphai stepped down in September 2025 after a decade, saying the skills that launch a company are not always the same ones needed to scale it.Â
For a period, the company was in a holding pattern, led by two co-CEOs while it searched for a permanent replacement.
Dyner AI is the answer to what comes next. Founded by two former actuaries, the startup has built an AI operating system for restaurants that plugs into point-of-sale, accounting, and supplier data to surface real-time insights on stock movement, pricing, fraud, and margins.Â
For Yoco, which already sits on transaction data from over 200,000 merchants, owning an AI layer that can turn that data into actionable intelligence is precisely the kind of move that separates a payments company from a commerce platform.
Yoco’s new CEO, Carsten Höltkemeyer, takes over on June 1, following a global search process. He joins from Solaris, the Berlin-based embedded finance group, where he led a difficult turnaround before departing at the end of 2025, and prior to that spent a decade running Barclaycard’s German business.Â
He inherits a company that has just made its first acquisition in over four years, with a clear signal of where it intends to go.