Pngme raises $15M Serie A funding to bolster capacity for greater financial inclusion

Pngme has raised $15 million in a Serie A round led by Octopus Ventures (a London-based multi-stage European venture capital investor), alongside other players like Lateral Capital, Unshackled Ventures, Future Africa, Aruwa Capital Management Two Small Fish Ventures,  Raptor Group, EchoVC, and several leading individual investors. This is less than a year after closing a $3 million seed round. Founded in 2018, the Africa-focussed startup is a machine-learning-as-a-service platform offering data infrastructure.

Pngme has set out on a mission to provide access to finance by providing data infrastructure and machine learning models that are crucial to the next generation of financial services. The Serie A will go into the expansion of the executive team, particularly the hiring of a Chief Strategy Officer and a Chief Technology Officer.  Lorraine Kageni Maina will take the position of CSO based on his extensive sub-Saharan corporate experience in FMCG, banking, and technology. The incoming CTO Nick Masson has led large engineering teams at WeWork and aims to scale Pngme’s cutting-edge technology. Other key hires are in engineering, data science, product, and sales.

Brendan Playford, CEO of Pngme attributed the rising demand they are seeing in the core markets as a validation of the efforts at “building financial data infrastructure and machine learning-as-a-service.” 

In addition to investment funds, Octopus Ventures will work closely with the Pngme team by sharing their industry experience and guidance. Octopus Ventures mainly invests in tech leaders in the fields of fintech, health, consumer, and B2B software. Other fintech companies in their portfolio are sprout.ai, cazoo, digital shadows, semafone, etc.