Payhippo, a Nigerian lending startup, has raised $3 million in a seed round to expand its talent base and network across more West African countries.

The startup focuses on credit delivery for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and needs to optimize its technology to accommodate its fast-paced growth.

The company’s co-founder and chief operations officer, Chioma Okotcha, said they are looking to hire more engineers and data scientists.

“We capture our data from the loans we issue, and more talent in the team would allow us to optimize our technology to serve our customers better,” she said.

The round was led by an array of angel investors, including Ham Serunjogi and Maijid Moujaled, the co-founders of the African cross-border payments company Chipper Cash; Olugbenga Agboola of the San-Francisco based payments firm Flutterwave; Bolaji Balogun, the CEO of investment banking firm Chapel Hill Denham; and Hakeem Belo-Osagie, the founder of Metis Capital Partners.

Payhippo has become a force in the Nigerian loan space in such a short time by being fast at it, eliminating the bottlenecks that have characterized banks’ loan process.

“We really focus on keeping this under three hours, and making sure that businesses can get the money they need when they need it. Ours is also a product that works for the SMEs in terms of a flexible repayment structure,” Okotcha said.

This is the largest amount Payhippo has raised to date after receiving $1 million in pre-seed funding earlier this year, according to TechCrunch.

The startup has focused on SMEs due to the size of its market. SMEs account for 96% of businesses and 84% of employment in Nigeria, and it’s seen as the backbone of the economy. However, it has come with a huge credit vacuum that has stalled the growth potential of the micro businesses.

Founded in 2019 by Okotcha, Zach Bijesse, now the chief executive officer, and Uche Nnadi, the chief technical officer, Payhippo was part of the 2021 Y Combinator summer cohort, and has shown its capability in filling the credit vacuum for SMEs.

“We had seen that traditional banks and lenders wouldn’t loan small businesses mainly because there were no credit scores, or the collateral requirements were too high. We decided to come into the market and create an instant financing option, where we create a credit score that allows small businesses to get the liquidity they need to buy inventory for business continuity,” Okotcha told TechCrunch.

“We use data from historical records that borrowers have built with us, but we also check their banking history to see the actual performance of their businesses,” said Okotcha.

But Payhippo is not the only digital lender in Nigeria offering short-term loans to SMEs. The startup is competing with others, including Carbon and FairMoney. Per TechCrunch, FairMoney disbursed a total loan volume of $93 million last year, representing a 128 percentage point increase from 2019, while Carbon said it had hit 659,000 customers last year and had disbursed $63 million in loans, an increase of 9.1 percentage points from the 2019 financial year.

Putting up a challenge to these rivals, Payhippo says it made $64,000 in revenue from around 5,000 it has so far disbursed. The startup says the repayment rate is 97% and that the total transaction is valued at $1 million. It added that the demand for credit is high, fueling its current 25% month-on-month growth.

Payhippo applies its own credit scoring formula that uses different SME data to determine the value of loans to give out. The loans are disbursed through mobile phones. The average loan disbursed by Payhippo is about $1,300, with the minimum loan being about $200.

The company says it is counting on its swift turnover in loan applications to grow its customer base within Nigeria before expanding to other countries.

Okotcha said going forward, Payhippo will ride on the untapped credit needs of the nearly 40 million SMEs in Nigeria to grow its business.

“We know that just 1% of the Nigerian market is about 40,000 businesses, and we want to be in a position where we disburse 40,000 loans in a day,” she said.

In view of our previous analysis on this topic, it’s needless to state that such a way of life known as sycophancy requires to be holistically thrown to the waste-bin, which is its rightful place, for eternity.

Intriguingly, only but a few had openly condemned this monster that’s gradually but steadily getting engraved in the psyche of most individuals in various quarters, probably consciously or otherwise, while trading their sense of honour and candour.

We must note that, on the average, it’s sycophancy that breeds despotism in any democratic terrain. This is the reason any leader who truly thinks good of the society or country he leads mustn’t in any way pamper its practice that’s flourishing unabated not just on the African continent but across the global community in its entirety.

The most worrisome, and perhaps amusing aspect of it is a situation where you would notice that those who never wanted the leader in question to emerge, are apparently the prime ‘supporters’ or allies of the affected leadership. This could presently be discovered in countries like Nigeria.

Of course, since their man had been defeated, they decided to take a u-turn to the other side of the road just to quench their selfish urge. Any leader that finds himself as a victim of this circumstance needs to, without equivocations, distance his leadership from this set of people who actually mean no good for the administration.

Similarly, on the part of the electorate, if they are sincerely yearning for a positive change, then must individually or collectively, say no to all these partisan activities occurring on a daily basis in our political space.

The youth that are widely reckoned to be the ‘leaders of tomorrow’ must steer clear of presentation of unmerited eulogy to any leader, so that, power would become theirs somebody as they earnestly anticipate; or like Esau, they ought to go ahead and sell their birthright just for a bowl of meats.

It’s worth noting that if they failed to desist from such an unwholesome attitude, any town-hall meeting organized in their respective jurisdictions by the government, in respect of governance, would definitely be marred by sycophancy.

Another devastating phenomenon, which triggers the senses of anyone who understands the societal implications of sycophancy, is that most political players have resorted to adopting the lifestyle as a norm or an occupation having inured themselves to it, thereby relegating morality, modesty and integrity to the background.

Pitiably, such affected individuals or groups ostensibly have no iota of plan in the nearest future to abjure such uncalled way of life, or even lose a bit of interest as regards the unnecessary passion they abruptly developed for it.

Against this backdrop, every well-meaning leader is expected to do everything within their reach towards ensuring that sycophants are not just shown the way out, but thoroughly prosecuted, acknowledging that they are deadlier than highway robbers. Hence, any leadership that’s genuinely determined to wipe out corruption must see sycophancy as a priority.

It ought to be treated as a crime, because it is highly criminal both before God and mankind. It doesn’t in any way deserve to be harboured within our various institutions, societies, or what have you.

The damage sycophancy has caused thus far, if well estimated, is far more than the challenges attributed to other vices to include corruption, graft particularly, kidnapping, and robbery, among many others.

Sycophants as a whole have taken more than they could chew, hence shouldn’t be spared by any leader or authority that truly intends to live up to the people’s expectations. The governed can’t fold their hands and watch a certain set of deceitful individuals hijack their common patrimony. It’s their collective duty to safeguard the treasury for the good of all regardless of whose ox is gored.

This significantly implies that there’s a compelling need to enact a strict law towards aptly addressing such anomalies as blarney (sycophancy) currently observed in every field of human endeavour, including but not limited to trading, education, health, politics, governance, business, and journalism.

It suffices to assert that the cankerworm is found in our everyday social, economic, as well as political lives. It is even on the rampage in most existing religious institutions within the shores and caprices of the globe.

Inter alia, our respective families aren’t exempted from the lingering can of worms. You would in most cases find a child or ward flattering his/her parent or guardian, as the case might be, in a bid to acquire their want or need. This is to say that all settings are at the moment experiencing the dangers inherent in the said menace.

Indeed, sycophancy which remains a deceptive gesture in any setting, is wicked, inhumane and deadly, thus deserves to be considered as such. Like cancer, it has conspicuously eaten up the soul and conscience of any country or society that harbours it, thereby crippling their socio-economic prospect.

The truth is that any issue in regard to sycophancy isn’t meant to be treated with kid’s gloves by anyone. This is a bitter fact any leader or leadership anywhere across the world needs to take into consideration if they actually want to succeed in the long run or as the journey progresses.

As a people, the monster has colossally taken us aback in all ramifications, hence the need to truncate its unannounced and unlicensed existence. To actualize this, we must be truthful to ourselves at all cost.