FinTech news in africa category
Its name change reflects that: Kudi, the simple cash-in, cash-out and payment and collection POS system, to Nomba, an omnichannel platform with a range of business and management tools for different types of businesses, which are also attractive to other fintechs offering interchangeable services such as Moniepoint, OPay and FairMoney, via its acquisition of CrowdForce.
African startups impacted by SVB collapse It is not yet clear how many African startups and VCs were affected by SVB’s collapse.
FTX marked down Chipper Cash’s $2B valuation to $1.25B The company says it has over 5 million customers across Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa and Kenya — and more recently, the U.S. and U.K., where the FTX-backed startup expanded last year to facilitate peer-to-peer money movement from both countries to select regions in Africa.
Following this growth, it is planning on expanding to Egypt and the UAE, while doubling down on Saudi Arabia, against the backdrop of $5 million pre-Series A funding it has raised, in a round led by Europe-based VC Speedinvest, which marked its debut into Saudi Arabia, and RAED Ventures, with participation from MENA focused VC firm Wamda Capital. His findings were not unique to him as a recent study showed an increasing dissatisfaction with HR tech providers — half of the respondents said they planned to change their systems for new technologies that offer better user experience and take remote working into consideration. For instance, in Saudi Arabia, palm.hr also has integrated with government services such as Mudad for digital payroll and compliance, mandated by the country ministry of labor; the General Organization for Social Insurance (GOSI), and Muqeem, the foreign employee’s data platform. Driven to bridge the gap, in 2019, Schrems (CEO) teamed up with Christoph Czichna (COO) and Dragan Nikolic (CPO), to launch Palm.hr, based out of Riyadh and whose clients include Hala, Thmanyah, the Saudi Venture Capital Company, Mozn, Jeeny, Rabbit.
Partech Africa II is one of three funds the global venture capital firm has launched in the last two years, including a $750 million growth fund and a $100 million seed fund, which target various markets and industries globally.
Egyptian fintech MNT-Halan lands $120M from Apis Partners, DisrupTech and others It’s been demonstrated that lending is MNT-Halan’s primary business and main revenue generator; however, what’s interesting about the company is how it has layered a digital ecosystem of products, including e-commerce, FMCG delivery and mobile POS payments that feed its lending operations. CEO Mounir Nakhla, who founded the company with Ahmed Mohsen, said MNT-Halan continued where it left off and is presently Egypt’s largest lender to the unbanked: Total loans disbursed now exceed $2 billion per the company’s website (MNT-Halan issued loans north of $65 million last month). In 2021, Halan, operating a digital wallet that offered bill payments, e-commerce and ride-hailing as well as micro, nano and consumer loans, entered into a swap agreement with MNT Investments (a microlending platform operating in Egypt with roots dating back to 2010) to provide financing solutions to the underbanked and unbanked. Egyptian fintech and e-commerce ecosystem MNT-Halan has raised up to $400 million in equity and debt financing from local and global investors as it continues to serve underbanked and unbanked customers in the North African country.
Kwara, a Kenyan fintech digitizing credit unions (saccos), more than doubled its client base last year, and its eyeing enormous growth in the coming years after raising a $3 million seed extension, and signing an exclusive digital solutions distribution agreement with the Kenya Union of Savings & Credit Cooperatives (Kuscco), the national umbrella body representing saccos. Kwara’s product upgrades the back-office operations of credit unions helping them to shift away from tedious paper-based processes and physical branches, opening up new avenues for them to sign up new members and create novel products. Kenya’s fintech Kwara lands $4 Million in seed round from Breega, SoftBank to build neobank for credit unions The company also has a next-generation neobank app that gives members of partner credit unions access to additional services such as instant loans and third-party services such as insurance.
However, since the first close of this fund, Ventures Platform, which made a complete exit during Paystack’s sale to Stripe, has upped its game and now cuts Series A checks for its portfolio companies, some of which can directly access follow-on capital (Series B up) from the firm’s limited partners. First, Damilola Teidi, the former director of startup support at incubation hub CcHUB, heads the firm’s Platform and Networks team and Desigan Chinniah, an early engineer at eBay and well-known investor who has backed some African startups, joins the firm as a venture partner. Launch Africa, the VC firm that has backed over 100 startups, closes first fund at $36.3M Byld Ventures, a $15M fund, backs fintechs in Africa He launched an on-demand food delivery platform in the U.K. a decade ago, ran Starta, an advisory firm for upstarts and scale-ups on the continent, worked as a principal at Pan-African fund Novastar Ventures, and most recently, was the chief commercial officer (CCO) at QED-backed TeamApt.
Other African startups on the list include: OVEX, a South African digital asset exchange and OTC trading desk ($5 million from FTX at a $122 million valuation); Kenya-based payment automation and settlement company AZA Finance ($25 million promissory note/loan); African mobile money unicorn Wave ($10 million in equity); South African crypto exchange platform VALR ($4 million equity); Nigerian crypto exchange startup Bitnob ($500,000 from FTX at a $20 million valuation); Nestcoin, a Nigerian web3 platform whose assets got stuck on SBF’s bankrupt crypto exchange platform ($250,000 equity from FTX at a $30 million valuation), and Congolese-based web3 startup Jambo ($500,000 in tokens). According to FT, the four-year-old fintech was one of over 450 investments Sam Bankman-Fried wanted to offer as collateral in an attempt to raise money for the FTX group, which includes 10 holding companies such as Alameda Research, FTX Ventures, FTX Trading, Maclaurin Investments and Clifton Bay Investments (the arm used to invest in Chipper Cash.) FTX processed billions monthly in Africa before going bust It’s not clear if Chipper Cash will maintain this valuation in its next priced round seeing as its lead investor FTX is currently bankrupt. Sam Bankman-Fried’s now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX led the round and Chipper Cash’s valuation skyrocketed to $2 billion, becoming one of Africa’s five unicorns last year.
Lagos-headquartered venture capital firm Future Africa is teaming up with TLG Capital, a London-based open-ended credit fund, to launch a $25 million venture debt fund earmarked for portfolio companies. Debt funding activity may have slowed down this year, but Future Africa founder and general partner Iyinoluwa Aboyeji told journalist that the cost and risk appetite of equity capital coupled with rising interest rates will push founders toward embracing debt to run startup operations. Future Africa intends to leverage the credit fund’s debt experience to build out this venture debt program. As Thacker’s quote reads, the structuring support from TLG has been offered to 13 of Future Africa’s portfolio companies so far (though the checks are yet to be written to these startups).
It expanded to the U.K. — allowing people to send money from the European nation to Chipper Cash’s African markets — and the U.S. — to facilitate peer-to-peer money movement from the U.S. to Nigeria and Uganda. CEO Ham Serunjogi founded Chipper Cash with Maijid Moujaled in 2018 to offer a no-fee peer-to-peer cross-border payment service in Africa via its app. The investment came barely six months after Chipper Cash closed its first Series C round of $100 million, led by SVB Capital, the corporate venture capital arm of SVB Financial Group. Chipper Cash, an African cross-border payments company valued at $2.2 billion last year, has laid off a portion of its workforce.
Cameroon’s Ejara raises $2M to offer crypto and investment services in Francophone Africa Chateau-Diop – who noted that Ejara has seen revenue growth 10x and achieved a 15% month-on-month transaction volume growth since last October despite crypto’s meltdown – expects users on the platform to reach 100,000 by the end of the year. By providing users in Francophone Africa with an option to buy, sell, exchange and store their crypto investments, CEO Nelly Chatue-Diop and her co-founder Baptiste Andrieux saw an opportunity to increase crypto activity in the region. With this product, the Cameroonian fintech asserts that users do not need to set up a bank account to access savings products but can instead start that journey with Ejara by downloading its app and depositing a minimum of 1,000 CFA franc (~$1.5). Ejara, a Cameroonian fintech offering an investment app that allows users to buy crypto and save through decentralized wallets, has raised $8 million in Series A investment.
This April, FTX announced a partnership with AZA Finance to roll out African and digital currency pairs and expand trading in nonfungible tokens (they managed to launch the fiat rails for Ghana and Senegal prior to FTX’s collapse). FTX offered to invest in Bitnob via stablecoins, to be held in custody on the defunct exchange, but the Nigerian crypto platform declined, according to two people familiar with the matter. There has been speculation that FTX and Alameda may have required their portfolio companies to hold their assets on the FTX exchange as part of their investment terms. In one case, FTX erroneously included BTC Africa, the parent company of Kenya-based payment automation and settlement platform AZA Finance, and its subsidiaries as entities under its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings.
New York-based venture platform Modus has launched Modus Africa, a venture capital fund for AI and blockchain startups across sub-Saharan Africa, journalist has learned. The firm is currently closing three investments in startups using AI and blockchain across insurtech, fintech and health tech, said the general partners who control the fund’s thesis, direction and investment strategy while leveraging Modus’s 50+ team to carry out due diligence and portfolio management. Though it has household names such as Tunisia’s InstaDeep, Kenya’s Sama, and South Africa’s DataProphet — and several web3 startups claiming to build on the blockchain — Africa’s AI and blockchain sectors are still relatively nascent. The thinking behind adopting this strategy can be traced to Vianney Mathonnet and Andre Jr. Ayotte, the general partners of Modus’s Africa-focused fund.
Launched today, Madica is a pan-African investment program that aims to offer funding, technology support and mentorship to underrepresented founders across the continent. And while venture capital and founder support programs within the continent are growing, a lot still remains to be done to meet the financing, technology and social capital needs of especially marginalized groups, like women founders. It is these gaps that continue to inspire the development of new programs like Madica by U.S.-based venture capital firm Flourish Ventures, which hopes to lessen the burdens of building startups. Venture studio Adanian Labs fuels startup growth in Africa Seedstars Africa Ventures appoints new partner to back more founders in the continent
Business owners can now connect their Instagram business account with Bumpa, receive Instagram DMs directly on their Bumpa app & sell products. Bumpa’s integration with Meta allows its merchants to connect Instagram and Facebook accounts to their Bumpa app, receive DMs from their customers and respond via the Bumpa app. Several tech observers have lauded the Meta integration, which, according to Umechukwu, will carry Bumpa to its next phase: bringing various digital solutions essential to the daily operations of small businesses and integrating them under the social commerce and retail automation platform. In the latest development, Bumpa, one of them which says it is building the infrastructure to power online commerce and enable African small business owners to start, manage and grow their businesses from their mobile devices, has raised a $4 million seed round.
To continue growth due to the rising demand for food and groceries and fuel its expansion across the MENAP region, MaxAB has raised more money, this time a pre-Series A to the tune of $40 million.
In a statement, Ibrahim Sarhan, eFinance’s chairman and CEO, said the investment in Nexta is in line with Egypt’s digital transformation plan and vision for 2030, including the Group’s plan to maximize its assets and investments by investing in the fintech space. Last year, Nexta obtained a provisional license from the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) and will look to fulfill further requirements and meet certain obligations before obtaining the CBE final approval for the agent banking license it needs to launch its services in the country. Nexta, an Egyptian startup that plans to launch its banking app in the coming months, has secured a $3 million investment from eFinance Group, a state-owned provider of digital payments solutions. Egyptians looking for fresh alternatives that do not include telco-powered mobile wallets and digital channels from legacy banks can turn to Nexta and Telda, the Sequoia-backed fintech that announced a $20 million seed round last week.
Atef argues that while both models have managed to increase e-commerce activities in Egypt, the big e-commerce players neglect the mass market and instead focus more on the three largest cities Cairo, Alexandria and Giza — while smaller social platforms tend to provide unreliable and unorganized service. Online shoppers in Egypt mainly purchase items on big e-commerce platforms such as Souq, which rebranded as Amazon Egypt in 2021; Jumia; and Noon or social commerce platforms that utilize Facebook pages and groups in a B2B2C manner. You can compare the e-commerce landscape in Egypt to fintech across Africa in that there are more startups in that sector than others; reports say 20% of tech startups in Egypt are in the e-commerce and retail sectors. In a statement, Sarah AlSaleh, a partner at Outliers Venture Capital, said the asset-light Kenzz is solving two key issues that current e-commerce incumbents are not addressing: affordable and reliable last-mile logistics and an uncompromising customer trust philosophy.
Banking-as-a-service platforms have become popular with companies trying to embed financial services into their offerings because large, incumbent banks have been relatively slow to bring their services up to speed with the pace of change in the world of tech and banking. Other investors in the round include Golden Palm Investments Corporation, Michael Vaughn (ex-COO, Venmo), Fintech Fund, Babs Ogundeyi (CEO, Kuda) Armyn Capital, Dunbar Capital, Strawhat Investment, Polymath Capital, Unpopular Ventures, Sean Mahsoul and MyAsiaVC. However, when outside requests flocked in en masse, they finally arranged to beta-launch Maplerad, the infra product that allows companies to embed powerful financial features like accounts, payments, FX and cards into their products, this August. In the latest development, Maplerad, a fintech described by its founders Miracle Anyanwu and Obinna Chukwujioke as a global BaaS player targeting Africa, has raised $6 million in seed funding.
When Sabbah spoke with journalist last year, he said Telda had obtained a license from Egypt’s apex bank, the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) under its new regulations, allowing the company to issue cards and onboard customers digitally. According to sources who spoke to journalist, Telda was yet to go live in the Egyptian market after raising that much money because it ran into issues with the apex bank, among them the appropriate licensing it needed to be called a digital bank, which seemed to be Telda’s description at the time. Telda, an Egyptian consumer money app founded by ex-Swvl executive Ahmed Sabbah last April, has raised $20 million in seed funding. Telda eventually secured licence approval from the CBE a few weeks ago to launch as a consumer money and payment app in the Egyptian market.
Spleet is also expanding its residential rent management offerings to include Collect, a service that automatically receives rent payments on behalf of landlords and Verify, a tool that enables landlords and real estate agents to vet and carry out adequate background checks on tenants before offering lease agreements. In 2018, he and Akintola Adesanmi — who was no stranger to how rent worked in Nigeria and also desired to effect change — brainstormed Spleet, a platform that partners with apartment owners to list their properties and offers renters options to pay rent monthly, quarterly and biannually. This relationship also supplied Spleet with the critical network of landlords required to list multiple units when it went live; the pitch to landlords was that Spleet would bring proper KYC into the rental process and allow them to verify tenants and automate rent collection. The rent financing solution, dubbed Rent Now, Pay Later, gives renters access to no-collateral loans up to ₦3 million (~$6,000) with an interest of about 3.5% monthly to finance rent payments.
It spotlights a decisive vote of confidence from the firm’s first fund investors, who have invested larger tickets in the second fund and commitments from new investors who share its vision for the potential of VC in Egypt and the region. In a past interview, managing partners Tarek Assaad and Karim Hussein told journalist that the firm hopes to back 31 startups from the second fund, which focuses on seed to Series B startups building in fintech, logistics, health tech, edtech and agritech sectors. Large institutional investors, including DFIs such as FMO, BII and IFC, are backing Algebra’s second fund — the IFC and FMO made $15 million and $10 million commitments into the fund, respectively. Last April, Egyptian and MENA-focused venture capital firm Algebra Ventures announced the launch of its $90 million second fund.
South Africa’s Talk360 raises $4M to build single payment platform for Africa Talk360 told us in a past interview, that its decision to be a payment aggregator was informed by the challenges it encountered in implementing digital payment options, which affected the bottom line of its internet calling business.
Retail investors within and outside Africa will then be able to access and trade cross-border stocks and bonds via white-labeled apps launched by brick-and-mortar brokers and powered by SecondSTAX or third-party wealth tech apps such as Bamboo, HashApp, Robinhood and Hisa. While local retail apps such as Bamboo and Chaka offer U.S. and foreign stocks to individual consumers, they are as constrained as traditional brokers when it comes to helping consumers buy stocks and bonds across different capital markets within Africa. Per reports, major regional exchanges in Africa have raised over $80 billion in equity capital markets and $240 billion in debt capital markets. However, at launch, it will launch in the first two, enabling routing of market orders for all stocks across Ghanaian and Kenyan exchanges and allowing cross-border transactions within both capital markets through its sponsoring broker partnerships.
It’s why Julaya launched its services in the west African country and has since expanded into Senegal, where mobile market penetration is around 80% as well as other countries in the UEMOA (West African Economic and Monetary Union) region, which also have prevalent mobile money usage. Proceeds from this financing round will assist the fintech in further expansion plans across Francophone West Africa as it plans to open offices in Benin, Togo and Burkina Faso, hire talent and boost product development including the launch of a credit product targeting 200,000 SMEs in the UEMOA region. EQ2 Ventures, Kibo Ventures, angel syndicates Unpopular Ventures and Jedar Capital, existing investors Orange Ventures, Saviu, 50 Partners and Ivorian business angel Mohamed Diabi and professional football player Édouard Mendy also invested in the round. The company, which facilitates B2B payments for businesses in Francophone West Africa, mainly via mobile money channels, has raised a total of $7 million in the financing round.
Kenya’s MotiSure rides on micro-payments to drive personal mobility insurance growth International startups shrug off US insurtech meltdown Why 2022 insurtech investment could surprise you Driven by a viable business model, the startup, which also has operations in Uganda and Nigeria, has entered its growth phase and is eyeing more partnerships in a bid to drive mass market insurance adoption in Africa. Through API integration Turaco’s partners like PayGo companies (M-KOPA), ride-hailing platforms (SafeBoda), fintechs and micro-finance institutions are able to bundle insurance with their core products or services. Through its B2B2C model, Turaco has created an expansive distribution channel that is enabling it to tap into a large pool of potential customers in its markets, providing insurance to a group that has never consumed it before.
Tech-talent marketplace MVP Match has raised €5 million ($5 million) seed funding from Stage 2 Capital to double down its strategy for pairing companies with talent from across the globe. Wense, who founded the startup in 2020 together with Philipp Petrescu, added that MVP Match acts as an Employer of Record, which enables it to manage the whole recruiting process including the establishment of local office spaces and talent onboarding. MVP Match said it uses product and technology executives like CTOs and experienced domain experts to vet talent before recommending them to companies. The plan to grow its reach follows the launch of a new hub in Egypt that MVP Match will use to tap talent in Africa — with the aim of creating more networks in the region.
Janngo Capital is one of the few female-founded, owned and led venture capital and private equity firms that see a clear investment opportunity in addressing Africa’s gender funding gap by making long-term commitments to back female-founded and female-led startups. So far, Janngo Capital has invested in 11 startups across Africa, including Sabi, a growth-stage B2B e-commerce platform with a female CEO and female-led Ivorian online freight marketplace Jexport while other startups, like fintech Expensya have male founders. After stints at Jumia as its former managing director at its Nigerian office and founding CEO of its Ivorian office, Fatoumata Bâ, a veteran of the African tech space, announced that her firm Janngo Capital was raising a €60 million fund (~$63 million) in 2019. The four-year-old venture capital firm doesn’t invest in only female-founded and female-led teams, though.
Before Capiter, Mahmoud was the co-founder and COO of Egypt-born and Dubai-based ride-hailing company SWVL (the company, which went public via a SPAC deal last year, laid off 32% of its staff this May) Egyptian startup Capiter raises $33M to expand B2B e-commerce platform across MENA B2B e-commerce platforms operate either asset-light or inventory-heavy models. The latter requires more capital and for Capiter, which employs a hybrid model, it’s unclear how the company has exhausted its funds and is already looking to sell after raising millions from Quona Capital, MSA Capital, Shorooq Partners, Savola and others last year. This information was further corroborated in a local news report where Capiter’s Board allegedly said that the founders had not been reporting to the board, its representatives and shareholders during on-site in-person due diligence for a potential merger.
Others include existing and new investors such as Adaverse, Flori Ventures, Tekedia Capital, GreenHouse Capital, ODBA, Five35 Ventures, Chrysalis Capital, Enrich Africa, Thrive Africa, Angellist Ventures and angel investors, including Rene Reinsberg, Marek Olszewski and Honey Ogundeyi. According to the CEO, Bitmama launched Changera at the intersection of blockchain payments and lifestyle, mainly targeting non-crypto-savvy people who are more comfortable using platforms with basic UI interfaces and less crypto jargon to communicate. The blockchain company will use the pre-seed to expand its operational presence, strengthen its team, consolidate its product offerings and plot market penetration across Africa while rapidly scaling new use cases for cryptocurrency within the continent, it said in a statement. Subsequently, they built a crypto exchange platform and allowed these users to access virtual assets formally and explore other use cases, including buying, selling and swapping crypto and peer-to-peer transactions.
The fintech, recently selected to participate in the Mastercard Start Path Global program for seed, Series A and later-stage startups, also wants to introduce new products to enhance its existing consumer banking, agency banking and merchant payment solutions and expand into African countries that fintechs from Nigeria rarely move to: Angola and Liberia. According to Berry, NowNow wants to set itself apart from the competition with the development of NFC-enabled tech that will allow tap-in functionality within its ecosystem of products, where users can use virtual or physical cards against an NFC-enabled phone or POS and tap from wallet to wallet using two phones. NowNow claims to have built an end-to-end ecosystem of financial products catering to agents, individual consumers and small businesses. When CEO Sahir Berry and his co-founder Mahesh Nair founded NowNow in 2016, they wanted to provide solutions to financial inclusion and job creation, two of the most significant pain points they thought were facing Nigeria and the rest of the continent.
Last batch, YC’s India founders appeared concentrated mostly within the financial services sector, around 30% when you consider that out of 36 Indian startups, 11 were in the fintech world. Out of the 21 startups YC backed in India this cohort, about 40%, or 8 startups, are in the fintech category. Despite a bit of a slowdown in fintech funding for private companies this year compared to the ultra-hot 2021 market, the sector remains much hotter than it was in years past, accounting for nearly 21% of total venture deals as of Q2 2022. YC’s startups are no exception – only time will tell if their approach of focusing in on international companies operating in niche markets will pay off or if consolidation in the sector has already gone too far for new upstarts to see breakout success.
Seedstars Africa Ventures, the pan-African early-stage fund for startups, has appointed Bruce Nsereko-Lule as its new general partner, to help it deploy more capital and provide the much-needed technical support for founders across the continent. At Seedstars Africa Ventures, Nsereko-Lule plans to continue backing founders in the continent at even a greater scale, as he is convinced that there are many great startups in Africa that are struggling to get funding. Nsereko-Lule told journalist that his focus at the fund will be helping it make great investments in the continent and provide initial and follow-on funding to cushion startups, and help them build and scale businesses. Prior to joining the fund, Nsereko-Lule was previously the founding investment principal of Chandaria Capital, a Kenya-based VC fund founded in 2017 to serve as the investment vehicle of the Chandaria Industries.
What started as a gaming guild offering play-to-earn scholarships to over 1,000 gamers to earn (up to $1,000 monthly, according to the platform’s pitch to users) from free-to-play Web 2.0 games and crypto games like Axie Infinity and Pegaxy has grown to a 100,000-member-strong community across an ecosystem including 2,000+ gamers, 10,000 Telegram and 20,000 Discord members. This February, Africa and emerging market-focused Nestcoin raised a pre-seed round to build, operate and invest in its web3 applications, including crypto content platform Breach Club and gaming guild Metaverse Magna (MVM). MVM, incubated in partnership with a multistrategy blockchain investment fund, Old Fashion Research (OFR), welcomed participation from investors including South Korean video game developer Wemade, Japan-based blockchain-focused venture capital firm Gumi Cryptos Capital (gCC), HashKey, Tess Ventures, LD Capital, Taureon, AFF, Polygon Studios, Casper Johansen (Spartan) and IndiGG. At the same time, in the interview, Bademosi stated that the gaming DAO platform was working on launching 10 Web 2.0 games (mostly hypercasual games across different genres), including Candy Blast — its version of Candy Crush — Wordler, Kong Clumb and Electron Dash.
The company numbers are small compared to other layoffs that have taken place within Africa’s tech ecosystem over the past few months, especially among startups that have raised vast sums of venture capital within the last year or two; for instance, Swvl laid off 400; Wave, approximately 300; 54gene, 95; and Vezeeta, 50. Meanwhile, it was just last August that the digital bank, which provides zero to minimal fees on cards, account maintenance and transfers and is one of Africa’s soonicorns, raised $55 million — money that it planned to use to not only double down on new services for Nigeria but also to prepare its launch into more countries on the continent like Ghana and Uganda — in a Series B round that saw it valued at $500 million. As Kuda positions itself for pan-African and international expansion amidst an uncertain venture capital environment, it depicts the recent cut in its workforce as part of strategic steps for sustainable growth. When Kuda held a town hall meeting last month, cutting down seemingly redundant roles and dismissing nonperforming staff to reduce costs and extending runway were topics of conversation in light of current macroeconomic trends, according to sources.
The gap that Kenya’s embedded finance fintech Pezesha seeks to bridge as it expands into Nigeria, Rwanda and Francophone Africa following a $11 million pre-Series A equity-debt round led by Women’s World Banking Capital Partners II with participation from Verdant Frontiers Fintech Fund, cFund and Cardano blockchain builder Input Output Global (IOG).
Thus, users in Nigeria and Kenya can receive foreign payments from more than 88 countries using USD, GBP and EUR bank accounts created on the platform, convert them into their local currencies (naira and shilling) and withdraw directly to their mobile money or local bank account. With its Grey Business product, the one-year-old fintech intends to tap into the market and provide a cheaper option to send and receive local currencies within the continent, particularly for micro and small businesses. In the latest development, Grey, a fintech in this category that provides virtual international bank accounts to African freelancers and remote workers, is announcing that it has raised $2 million in seed funding. COO Aghedo said the company privately launched a business-focused product, Grey Business, to complement this consumer-facing growth and extend its product beyond remittances and person-to-person payments.
Anchor claims to be transacting several millions of dollars while growing 200% month-on-month. After testing these features with a select few, Anchor is coming out of stealth with a $1 million+ pre-seed and making its platform public.
Google Wallet is now available in South Africa, the first market for this product in Africa, to make it easy for users to save and easily and securely access their payment cards, loyalty cards and boarding passes. Google said that cardholders of partner banks in South Africa that include FirstRand Bank, Discovery Bank, Investec, Standard Bank, ABSA and Nedbank can now add their details on the wallet, and make contactless payments using their Android phones and Wear OS devices. Google announced the South Africa launch alongside Moldova, Qatar, Serbia, Azerbaijan and Iceland, making the product available in 45 countries. The Google Wallet launch in South Africa comes more than a year after Apple Pay entered the market too.
Dubai-based Zywa, a neobank for Gen Z, plans to fuel its growth in the United Arabs Emirates (U.A.E), and to kick-start its expansion to Saudi Arabia and Egypt after raising $3 million seed funding at over $30 million (110 million AED) valuation. The fintech is also adding community-based value-add services like a platform it is building within the app to enable users to apply for internships at Zywa and partner startups, as a strategy for encouraging users to start earning early. They created Zywa as a social banking app and prepaid card to make it possible for the Gen Z (between the age of 11-25 years) to receive money, manage it, and make payments. Zywa also plans to introduce a social element to its app by enabling its users to share photos or videos of their purchases, and to react to their friends’ purchases on different feeds.
Then we have GPs of global VC funds like Ribbit Capital’s Micky Malka, Hustle Fund’s Elizabeth Yin, Sebastes Capital’s Jason Fish, a16z’s David Haber, Y Combinator’s Michael Seibel, 776’s Alexis Ohanian, Bonow Ventures’ Tilo Bonow, Precursor Ventures’ Charles Hudson, Better Tomorrow Ventures’ Sheel Mohnot, Broadhaven Ventures’ Michael Sidgmore, etc.; Web 2.0 and web3 operators; local and international HNIs; sport and entertainment icons; and PAVE Investments (the anchor LP in Microtraction Fund I), which has committed $1.5 million into the community fund. Microtraction, an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in African startups at the pre-seed stage, is announcing that it has reached the first close of its second fund, Microtraction Community Limited. The LPs in this community fund include 30+ venture-backed founders of African companies like Helicarrier’s Ire Aderinokun, Paystack’s Shola Akinlade, Cowrywise’s Razaq Ahmed, 54gene’s Francis Osifo, Paga’s Jay Alabraba, Spleet’s Tola Adesanmi, Float’s Jesse Ghansah. Microtraction is also venturing into the web3 space by setting up a community vehicle (akin to a DAO) where social tokens will be used to incentivize and gamify the experience of members who provide value-add and support to the fund and founders.
To bridge the input-access gap, iProcure, a B2B agtech, has since 2014 been connecting agricultural manufacturers and distributors to local retailers (agro-dealers), through its unique distribution infrastructure that interlinks agricultural supply chains.
Led by Gavin Wood, co-creator of Ethereum and its founding CTO, Parity’s partnership with Watr is designed to co-develop the Watr protocol and key applications, and execute joint R&D on the functionality required to make the platform perform for the $17 trillion dollar commodities industry. Omar Elassar, global head of Ecosystem Growth & Business Development at Parity Technologies, said in a statement: This collaboration will bring Watr’s deep commodities’ expertise to the Polkadot ecosystem and kick-start a platform for web3-enabled solutions that solve pressing industry issues. We covered how the Watr Foundation, a Swiss-registered foundation created by experience commodities founders, plans to do this via the use of blockchains, incorporating the technology into commodities trading. We are thrilled to have the legendary team at Parity join us and our existing partners in enabling commodities’ transition to Web3 business models and liquidity while safeguarding the security and decentralized ethos of a public blockchain servicing both retail and regulated institutional users.
Four Tencent veterans want their offering .bit, an identity protocol built on the blockchain, to become the universal identification system in web3, like how emails and phone numbers became ubiquitous in Web 2.0, while giving users control over their own data rather than letting it reside in the platforms they use. The strategy won investor support as the company has closed a Series A funding round of $13 million led by CMB International, which is owned by the Chinese conglomerate China Merchants Group, HashKey Capital, known for its early investment in Ethereum, QingSong Fund, GSR Ventures, GGV Capital and crypto-focused investment firm SNZ. On Jike, a social network favored by China’s tech workers, venture capitalists and web3 enthusiasts, people are attaching the .bit suffix to their names even if they haven’t actually registered an account with the platform. The company’s next ambition is to promote the use of .bit for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), said Yeoh.
The new capital will assist Pastel in increasing its efforts in this area as it looks to expand its product offerings and develop more productivity and finance management features and tools around group savings, loans and payments for small businesses.
In TeamApt, QED finds a company that bootstrapped for four years before raising a venture round in 2019 but has grown 300% annually to build one of the largest fintechs in Africa (in revenue and market cap)–and is profitable.
In the latest development, Youverify, a Lagos and San Francisco–based identity verification company helping African banks and startups automate KYC and other compliance procedures, is announcing that it has secured a $1 million seed round extension. However, in a bid to serve more clients, the company launched its proprietary technology, the Youverify OS (YVOS), which provides a single platform for automating due diligence and combines risk and compliance management with its core identity verification platform to deliver these fintechs an enterprise-grade compliance solution. Nearly two-thirds of Nigeria’s commercial banks, such as Standard Chartered, Standard Bank and Fidelity Bank, use the platform’s identity verification and KYC products, Youverify said. In addition to verifying identities beyond Nigeria’s bank verification number (BVN) and addresses, Odegbami says Youverify layers KYC and compliance products such as transaction monitoring.
It’s not only the digital platforms that want to sell insurance products, but also to help existing players be more efficient in their distribution of products, allowing them to play a role in increasing the insurance penetration level.
Oui Capital, an Africa-focused VC firm based in Lagos and Massachusetts, announced today that it has completed the first closing of its $30 million second fund, Oui Capital Mentors Fund II, as it seeks to strengthen its presence on the continent.
A day after Central Bank of Kenya (CBK), Kenya monetary authority, said that Chipper Cash and Flutterwave were not licensed to operate in the East African country, the regulator has directed all financial institutions to cease doing business with the two fintechs. The CBK’s bank supervision deputy director, Matu Mugo, in a letter, directed all regulated banks, microfinance and mortgage finance institutions to stop their partnerships with the two startups with immediate effect — dealing a blow to Flutterwave and Chipper Cash, some of Africa’s highest valued startups. Flutterwave, which is also facing money laundering allegations in Kenya, in a statement said it has been operating in the country through partnerships with regulated banks and telecoms, as it waits for a payments service provider license it applied for in 2019. The letter to the bank CEOs followed remarks by CBK’s governor, Patrick Njoroge, that the two startups are not licensed remittance or payment service providers in Kenya — one of the biggest fintech hubs in Africa.
Cathay AfricInvest Innovation Fund (CAIF), a Pan-African fund launched via a partnership between AfricInvest, a multi-asset investment platform in Africa and Cathay Innovation, a European-born but global-focused venture capital firm, has achieved a final close of €110 million.
Bloom’s seed round is the largest in Sudan, a country whose tech ecosystem can be termed passive and only recently welcomed foreign investment when Fawry backed fintech and e-commerce player Alsoug after 30 years of international sanctions on the country.
But in May, Union54 began experiencing some operational issues with its product, resulting in the temporary suspension of its Bank Identification Number (BIN), the first four to six numbers on a payment card that identifies a card issuer. They attributed the virtual dollar card service disruption to an update from a card partner — which happens to be Union54 — without citing a definite recommencement time. This April, when we covered Union54, whose API allows companies to issue debit cards to their customers and employees without needing a bank or a third-party processor, it had just raised a seed extension, bringing its total seed round to $15 million (Tiger Global led both rounds). Many have begun searching for alternative options, which include Sudo Africa, another card-issuing platform and other fintechs, which claim to be unaffected by Union54’s downtime (as a result of using another provider), such as Chipper Cash, Mono and Bitmama.
Wave, an African fintech that offers mobile money services in Senegal and Ivory Coast, laid off about 15% of its workforce last month. Thus, the layoffs affected almost 300 employees, most of whom worked in Wave’s new markets: Burkina Faso, Mali and Uganda. The Senegal-based startup likely has enough money in the bank for the next few years, and last week, it secured a €90 million syndicated loan from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Lendable, Norfund and other lenders in one of the largest debt deals on the continent. journalist first got a whiff of the layoff news on LinkedIn, where Jessica Chervin, a former Andela executive who joined Wave as an expansion lead in March, wrote that she was leaving the company.
Elivalat Fintech Ltd., Hupesi Solutions, Cruz Ride Auto Ltd and its director Simon Karanja Ngige, Boxtrip Travels and Tours, Bagtrip Travels Ltd. accounts, and Adguru are the entities said to have received the funds from Flutterwave, and whose accounts were also frozen.
In matured markets such as South Africa, Adenuga said BII will have an on-the-ground presence and offer its full suite of services ranging from climate finance, funding for financial inclusion, and equity and debt financing.
While banks use rigorous credit policies and don’t care much about small businesses, particularly those without any local credit history or track record, informal lenders act as loan sharks to the detriment of these businesses.
TLcom Capital has appointed Eloho Omame as a partner six months after announcing the first close of TIDE Africa Fund II, its $150 million second fund.
While they provide digital wallets to help facilitate money transfers, there’s a lack of mobile wallet interoperability outside their ecosystem; in essence, moving money from one fintech wallet to another fintech or non-fintech wallet (in the case of an embedded finance play) is hard.
After extending credit to thousands of customers over mobile phones since 2015, Ghana-based fintech Fido is now in search of additional growth avenues for its expansion across Africa.
The fintech also highlighted its efforts in bringing in two hires to chart its next growth phase: Meghan Taylor, an ex-partner at Boston Consulting Group, who is now its chief of staff and Julian Adkins, ex-Africa CFO at telecom operator Millicom, who operates as the company’s group chief financial officer.
Pan-African venture capital fund Launch Africa Ventures today is announcing the close of its $36.3 million fund, which it has primarily used to invest in B2B and B2B2C startups across Africa.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of Work Bank, plans to make an equity investment of up to €25 million ($26.43) into the Partech Africa Fund II (PAF II) by the Paris-based VC firm Partech.
Twitter co-founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey is teaming up with artist Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) to launch The Bitcoin Academy at Marcy Houses, the public housing complex in Brooklyn, New York where Jay-Z grew up.
Backbase — an Amsterdam-based startup that provides a platform that banks and others can use to better structure and leverage the data that they have, and to then use that to build more personalization and other new features into those banks’ customer-facing services — has raised €120 million ($128 million at today rates).
The startup, which provides multiple products for the cross-border commerce space in Africa, raised this new financing from a group of international investors co-led by American Express (AMEX) Ventures, the strategic investment group of American Express
MFS Africa infrastructure merges fragmented and disparate payment schemes across Africa into one seamless network so individuals and businesses within mobile money ecosystems can transact across borders and currencies.
So lenders can use Indicina for credit scoring and bank sentiment analysis, getting access to ML-driven financial analytics and improved insights into consumers they currently don’t have and derisk unsecured loans.
Using the funds raised from the investors, among them Founders Factory Africa, Texas-based Kon Ventures, Europe-based venture capital collective Crypto League, Ghana-based R9C Ventures and Maximus Ventures, Ayoken plans to sign a number of exclusive deals with artists and partnerships with telcos, besides growing its team and secondary marketplaces.
These challenges befall millions of micro-retailers across the continent, and Betastore, a B2B retail marketplace for informal retailers, is working to resolve in Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Senegal.
When people have little or no confidence in the financial system, or they don’t know certain financial services that meet their needs exist or they don’t have formal identification documents to seek these services, achieving optimal financial inclusion can prove herculean.
The startup, which targets motorcycle taxi (boda boda) operators, their passengers and users of other forms of public transport (hereafter commuters), is building a business around daily micro-payments for personal accident covers, with some premiums going as low as $0.1. Macharia’s interest in the sector began in 2018 when he launched a pay-per-use micro insurance product for motor vehicles — which was informed by data and patterns he had observed when he operated an automobile repair shop. The personal accident coverage for motorcycle taxi operators, which requires premiums of $0.1 day ($3 a month) includes medical expenses up to $6,000 annually, and payment for loss of income due to hospitalization following an accident, disability or death. Macharia said their approach was informed by studies showing that boda boda riders desired insurance products that went beyond asset coverage.
Akinin narrated how merchants would use a platform’s BNPL offering, generate revenue, and proceed to pay for the next invoice with this profit or purchase stock from another supplier in an entirely different supply chain.
The automotive marketplace where customers can sell and buy used cars has raised a pre-seed round of $12.6 million–the largest of its kind in MENA and sub-Saharan Africa, besting what Rabbit, a 20-minute convenience delivery startup, pulled in last November.
African payments company Interswitch has secured a $110 million joint investment from LeapFrog Investments and Tana Africa Capital to scale its digital payment services across the continent, the two private investment firms said in a statement Wednesday. Alongside existing investors, LeapFrog and Tana plan to work with management to continue to drive Interswitch’s pan-African strategy.
Nnadi says his company will engage more African governments — including those who have an anti-crypto stance like Nigeria and Kenya– to see the benefits of blockchain and assist in drafting licensing regimes for crypto companies to operate in their countries. In a statement, the company revealed that it struck a partnership with the Central African Republic — the first country to legalize bitcoin as a legal tender in Africa and second globally only to El Salvador –to become its official crypto partner and an advisor to the president on crypto strategy and planning.
Powered by this seed funding led by MaC Venture Capital, Identitypass plans to expand its existing infrastructure, roll out new verticals around compliance, security and data collection, and push into new African countries. These end points are government-approved IDs, such as national IDs, driver licenses, international passports, bank verification numbers (BVN), phone numbers, vehicle plate numbers, debit cards, security watchlists and tax history.
The startup also has its eyes on the growing e-commerce market in East Africa, with the long-term goal of growing into a pan-African shipping logistics provider – by tapping the e-commerce market in Africa, which has experienced 18% annual growth since 2014.
Egyptian fintech Paymob, which enables merchants to accept digital payments online and in-store, announced today it has raised $50 million in Series B funding. The Tap-on-phone product leverages contactless payments technology so that these merchants can turn their NFC-enabled smartphones — personal or commercial — into a POS by downloading a Paymob-powered app.
The Bank of Uganda, in a letter, said it had not licensed any payment provider or operator, including banks or fintechs, to sell or facilitate trade using crypto — while also making reference to the government’s stand that crypto is still not legal tender. A country of 5.4 million people according to the World Bank, and one of the poorest countries in the world despite being rich in resources like diamond and gold, the CAR became only the second country in the world to legalize bitcoin, after El Salvador.
They include Breyer Capital, Propel VC, Better Tomorrow Ventures, FT Partners, Bain Capital, Lateral Capital, a few family offices, HNIs and a multibillion-dollar crossover fund also known for investing in smaller funds. Rali_cap, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on emerging markets fintech, has launched a $30 million fund.
Pangea Trust — an East African accelerator and investment platform, diaspora remittances can be tapped to increase the amount of funding injected into startups. However, a perspective-shift is required for this to happen and that is why Pangea, working in partnership with Swedish International Development Cooperative Agency and Kenya Diaspora Alliance, has since last year organized a series of events geared towards educating those in the diaspora on why startups are good investment options.
Zenda, a UAE-based startup looking to change how parents pay school bills, and the way educational institutions manage fee collection, is eyeing Africa as its next frontier for growth.
Union54 can reach an agreement with participating central banks and issue its own domestic and continental debit card, it can shorten settlement time and integrate more local payments native to the region. Mlambo also added that through his and a few colleagues’ work via the African Renaissance Conference, Union54 has gotten in touch with three central banks keen to explore how settlement agreements would work with a new card scheme.
Umba said it brings a wide range of transparent and accessible financial products to those underserved by legacy banks across Africa — only 43% of the region’s population are account holders at financial institutions. However, the new funding will allow the company to test this out as it prepares to launch in new markets, including Egypt, Ghana and Kenya, where mobile money is prominent.
ImaliPay’s pilot was based on Furusa’s encounter: a buy now, pay later (BNPL) fuel product, but for two-wheeler gig platforms as the company partnered with a few fuel stations in Ibadan, Nigeria to offer this service to SafeBoda riders.
In Nigeria, POS terminals are used to process card payments at retail locations as well as for agency banking purposes, a branchless banking system where agents act like human ATMs. Its mobile application allows small businesses across the retail, agency banking, hospitality and services sectors to perform similar tasks, such as tracking sales and managing business operations, said Olawale.
Khazna plans to launch additional products before the end of the year; this product expansion and user growth is what Saleh points out when asked how Khazna stays ahead of the competition. The company, founded by Omar Saleh, Ahmed Wagueeh, Fatma El Shenawy, and Omar Salah in 2019, provides basic banking and various financial services focusing on middle and lower-income earners. In a country where 50% of its 100 million people are active smartphone users, two out of every three individuals have little or no access to formal financial services in Egypt.
The credit card is one of two options — the second via the mobile app — consumers can use to access CredPal’s BNPL services when they visit a partner store to shop for items ranging from electronics, particularly smartphones, to furniture and groceries. To that effect, CredPal, one of the earliest pioneers of buy now, pay later in Nigeria, has closed a bridge round of $15 million in equity and debt — the latter constituting a very large chunk of the financing — to expand its consumer credit offerings across Africa.
Kwik, a Nigeria and French-based startup that provides logistics services to B2B merchants, from social vendors to e-commerce platforms, has raised $2 million in Series A funding. Since launching in Lagos in 2019 and extending its presence to Abuja, the company has onboarded more than 100,000 merchants who use Kwik’s site and mobile apps to run the logistical, commercial and financial needs of their businesses.
The round of funding is good news for both employees and early backers who took a bet on Wasoko years ago as new investors Tiger Global and Avenir Growth Capital lead its Series B round (the pair also co-led Flutterwave’s Series C investment last March).
Moove, an African mobility fintech that provides vehicle financing to drivers of ride-hailing platforms like Uber and other gig networks, has raised $105 million in new Series A2 financing.
OkHi’s grand mission, the founder says, is to get these people who don’t have a physical address included in the global address system.
Upon carefully studying different models pioneered by digital-first banks such as TymeBank, Kuda and FairMoney, they saw a big gap for building a savings product that helps solve what they think is the biggest problem facing African consumers: inflation and currency devaluation.
So, users from different countries — Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya, for now — can connect their bank or mobile money accounts to Dash, pay bills, and send and receive money to other users while the platform handles currency conversions.
Shop owners who intend to offer loans to their end consumers get higher credit lines from Chari, which shares the data collated from Karny (on end consumers’ purchasing behaviour) with FMCG companies that pay for the cost of the higher loans.
Two years later, after the platform did not make enough revenue from developers, the team chose to go vertical to what it is today, Stax, a universal money app on USSD rails for African users. The company, founded by Ben Lyon, Jess Shorland and David Kutalek, fetches all these codes from multiple accounts together into an app users can access offline, letting them perform transactions without dialling any USSD code.
Say a company uses Sudo Africa to issue cards for employee expense management; what happens is that employees are given cards with a low balance so whenever they need to use the card, an API is called each time to decide whether to approve or deny that transaction in real time.
The simple reason is that people need smartphones more than they need solar systems, evident in M-KOPA’s numbers as of July last year — which in 18 months had already sold 500,000 smartphones, half the units solar systems managed in 10 years. M-KOPA is known chiefly for its pay-as-you-go (PAYG) financing model that allows customers to build ownership of appliances over time by paying an initial deposit followed by flexible micro-payments.
Nestcoin raises $6.45M pre-seed to accelerate crypto and web3 adoption in Africa and frontier markets Educating Africa’s young population about web3 and decentralization seems to be a correlating theme with recent web3 upstarts in Africa.
Earnipay, a fintech that provides flexible and on-demand salary access to income-earners, has raised $4 million in seed financing led by early-stage venture capital firm Canaan.
Ayorinde said CrowdForce will use the funding to distribute more point of sale terminals to its partners in the next 12 to 18 months as the company, in a statement, said it aims to bring financial services within one kilometer, or within 15 minutes, of all Nigerians.
At $3 billion, Flutterwave is currently the highest valued African startup, surpassing the $2 billion valuation set by SoftBank-backed fintech OPay and FTX-backed cross-border payments platform Chipper Cash last year.
Integration with payment providers in sub-Saharan Africa (mainly serving Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa) like Yoco, Paystack and Flutterwave will follow suit, said the chief executive, without giving specifics about when it would roll out the product for the region.
On the call, Pillay, who co-founded Stitch with Natalie Cuthbert and Priyen Pillay, didn’t give any update on this metric but said Stitch had seen a 104% month-on-month growth in payments value since launching the product last April.
Yele Oyekola, a former product lead at Carbon, started Duplo based on his experience as an economic policy officer for the UN in Africa, where touring different countries opened his eyes to how people and businesses were heavily reliant on cash.
Some tech insiders don’t view companies such as Zepz, Zipline or Tala as African companies — some see them as international companies headquartered in the U.S. or the U.K. with Africa as one of their markets, unlike other companies that are headquartered in Africa or both Africa and the U.S. The Big Deal tracks funding rounds from $100,000 and above from startups operating in Africa with their headquarters on the continent or HQ outside Africa but with founders from Africa. Fintechs in Africa continue to overshadow all other startups in funding gained Nigeria and South Africa are in the top two; Egypt and Kenya switch Briter doesn’t say, but it reveals more frightening stats that go almost a decade back: 3.2% of African VC total funding and 8.2% of deals have gone to all-female co-founded teams since it started keeping track in 2013.
According to him, about 87% of Thndr users invested for the first time through the platform; 40% of its users come from outside of Cairo and Alexandria — rural areas with zero access to financial institutions; and Thndr accounts for 36% of all new registrations in the local Egyptian exchanges in 2021.
While some customers use these accounts, others still exchange currency from their cards or domiciliary bank accounts with limited bank partners supporting foreign exchange transfers in Nigeria.
The investors that participated in the round include China-based Chuangshi Capital, Yunshi Equity Investment Management, Trust Capital, Chengyu Capital and private equity fund AfricaInvest.
The idea for Casava came while VisaCover provided an alternative in the auto insurance market by allowing drivers of Uber, which was one of its partners, to make weekly insurance payments instead of quarterly or yearly payments insurance partners before it operated.
While DCG focuses on western markets and building products for HNIs and institutional clients with custodial features, Nestcoin primarily builds, invests and operates web3 and non-custodial products that are more accessible for everyday people in frontier markets. Before starting Nestcoin, founders Yele Bademosi and Taiwo Orilogbon led the charge at Bundle Africa.
They differ in the type and class of securities they offer; for instance, Bamboo gives access to U.S. stocks, ETFs and ADRs, while Chaka deals with stocks and ETFs trading on local and foreign capital markets, but all have collectively been subjected to regulatory issues at home.
The firm, with offices in the countries above, is the latest big-sized Africa-focused VC fund that includes the likes of TLcom Capital which recently closed nearly half of its new $150 million fund; Novastar Ventures, a $200 million fund; and Partech Ventures, a $143 million fund.
The founders say that while sellers often want the products at their doorsteps, the availability and flexibility of both options differentiate Brimore from similar social commerce platforms such as Taager. The opportunity in the market can be attributed to the growth in online social sellers in the country, over 1.25 million them, helping little-known brands sell and distribute their goods via different networks.
This data is analyzed to provide businesses with support ranging from tailored recommendations, reports through daily business tips, monthly business seminars and access to an on-demand business coach.
Karny gives Chari valuable data on the loans provided by grocery stores to their customers and allows Chari to credit-assess the unbanked shop owners, determining the most applicable payment terms to give each.
On a call with journalist, QED co-founder and managing partner Nigel Morris said that adding Africa is the final jigsaw puzzle that makes QED Investors a fully global fintech-specialist firm. Before QED Investors, Ajayi worked in different roles across Africa and global fintech/tech.
The three-year-old company has signed publishing deals for seven games from six studios globally, including Tilting Point, publisher of Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off, which Carry1st recently launched in Africa.
Zanifu works with a number of manufacturers and distributors to extend the credit to these small businesses with retailers already sourcing products from the startup’s partners qualifying for the financing.
Finclusion Group, a fintech that uses AI algorithms to provide financial services to African customers via an array of credit-centric products, has raised $20 million in debt and equity pre-Series A financing.
Today, the startup has also partnered with Standard Bank, headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa and with a presence in 20 countries across the continent, to offer financial services to millions of workers (like motorcycle taxi operators) in the informal sector through the startup’s proprietary digital loan origination system.
In addition to flexible credit lines for businesses to cover cash flow gaps, Float also has software tools for businesses to manage accounts and wallets in one dashboard, as well as automate bills, vendor or supplier payments and invoice collections.
The fund invests in at least half of companies that explicitly address the energy needs of women consumers and entrepreneurs in Africa, and those offering renewable energy solutions to businesses and households.
The funding will be used to continue growing GPS’s business — which includes a range of fintech services such as payments, direct debits, and standing orders; virtual cards; mobile wallets; fraud prevention; expense management; cryptocurrency management; BNPL and more.
In its bid to traverse Africa, where opportunities abound as e-commerce and alternative credit sources grow, Lipa Later will have to contend with competition from South Africa’s Payflex (which was recently acquired by Australian BNPL Zip) and PayJustNow, and Nigeria’s PayQart and Carbon Zero.
Unlike most developed countries, the West African nation lacks an advanced credit bureau system to detail people’s credit histories, so there’s some scepticism to how Fintech Farm will use credit cards to operate.
It has raised a $6.2 million pre-Series A round while rebranding to ANKA, the SaaS platform it launched for sellers in partnership with DHL and Visa in April last year. In an interview journalist had with the chief executive last year, he touted ANKA as the largest e-commerce exporter startup on the continent, claiming it ships over 10 tons of cargo per month from Africa.
And while currently building out its buy now, pay later infrastructure (which gives businesses a chance to sell products regardless of whether customers have money or not), ThankUCash plans to add a fourth offering soon: a remittance product where merchants can sell directly to the diaspora.
Bfree was founded by Chukwudi Enyi (COO), Moses Nmor (CPO) and Flosbach (CEO), who were looking to develop better, ethical and tech-inspired debt-collection tools and processes following their firsthand experience working for digital lenders in Nigeria. Ethical debt collection standards ensure the privacy of customer information during the process.
The continent is already a global leader in mobile money adoption, accounting for the bulk of the mobile money transactions made in 2020 — a year that saw the number of mobile money accounts rise by 43%. For instance, M-Pesa, a mobile money service by East Africa’s biggest telco, Safaricom, does not require internet connectivity for its customers to send and receive money, as well as to pay utility bills — the wallet turns subscribers’ phone numbers into a sort of proxy for bank accounts.
The Koko Club products, displayed in designated spaces within the agents’ small shops, will only be sold to registered Koko Club members. Koko Club, its new business line, is selling the products directly to consumers through the dukas (small shops) that currently serve as the company agents for its bio-ethanol cooking fuel and stoves. The shop owners (agents) are using Koko’s PoS system to sign up customers, capturing their biodata, and issuing them with an electronic card that they will use when buying products from any Koko Club shop.