Nigeria’s fintech boom has seen a lot of payments startups rise to the top from scratch in the shortest period of time that could only be imagined in the past. And as the days go by, we see more fintechs create new records of faster growth.
Mono, a Nigeria-based financial data startup, announced on Monday that it has raised a $15 million Series A round.
The round was led by Tiger Global, a venture capital firm that has invested in Flutterwave and FairMoney earlier this year, and new investors; Target Global, General Catalyst and SBI Investment. Also participating are existing investors including Entree Capital, Lateral Capital, GPIC, Acuity VC and Ingressive Capital.
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Mono has recorded a series of fundraising rounds, which added to the Series A round, puts its capital above $17 million.
The startup raised a seed round of $2 million from a number of investors including Entrée Capital, Lateral Capital, and Babs Ogundeyi, co-founder and CEO of Kuda, in May. That’s in addition to the $500,000 it raised in September 2020 and the $125,000 received as part of the Winter 21 cohort of Y Combinator.
Founded in 2020 by Abdul Hassan and Prakhar Singh, Mono offers open banking solutions, helping businesses and individuals to access financial data from commercial banks.
The new investment will help Mono to expand its services to other African countries. Already in Ghana, it targets new markets in Sub-Saharan countries including Kenya, Egypt, and South Africa. Mono said expansion into these new markets will take effect from 2021.
This coming a few days after Payday, a payment startup announced that it has secured $1 million in pre-seed funding to build a platform to enable swift global payments for Africans.
The investment, which was led by LoftyInc Capital, Microtraction, Magic Fund, Ventures Platform, Voltron Capital, CcHub Syndicate, Helicarrier Inc, Greencap Equity, Midlothian Angel Network, Emergence Capital, Olugbenga Agboola (GB); also has many individual participants. They include Charles Odita, Eke Eleanya, Adegoke Olubusi, Edmund Olotu (Bloc), Prosper Otemuyiwa (Eden), Dimeji Sofowora, Perseus Mlambo (Union54), Abdul Hassan (Mono), and Onyekachukwu Somtochukwu Eyisi.
Founded in June 2021 by Favour Ori, Payday offers cross-border payment services that accommodates various transactions, including virtual cards and tuition fees. The startup said it has processed over $2m in transactions within 11 weeks.
The startup said the swiftness and affordability of its services beat that of other payment services. According to Payday, you can receive your cash in less than 1 minute!
Commenting on the funding, the CEO Favour Ori said: “Payday will expand into new territories and also hire talents for their Engineering, Product, Compliance and Growth roles to scale its operations and also acquire additional licenses”
Emerging startups in the Nigerian fintech space are figuring out frictions and fixing them, thereby speeding up the pace of their growth.
For instance, Mono’ services means businesses can now link the companies with their apps to fetch transactions, statements, balance, income, and identity data. The result of the new idea has been rapid growth.
“A year ago, we launched Mono, and we’ve grown rapidly since. Our vision to power businesses with access to financial data and direct bank payments has progressed with a lot of learning,” the company said in a statement.