Nigerian API fintech, Mono, raises $500k pre-seed, wants to build Plaid for Africa

Nigerian API fintech startup, Mono, has announced its pre-seed funding of $500,000.

Launched in August 2020, Mono enables companies and developers to access financial accounts for historical and real-time transactions, balances, bank statements, credits, and spending patterns of a customer.

In partnership with payment gateways in Nigeria like Flutterwave, Mono also has the capabilities to initiate direct debit payments and recurring debits on customers’ accounts.

The startup was founded by Abdulhamid Hassan, ex-Product Manager, Paystack and Prakhar Singh, who previously founded Transferpay.ng.

After leaving his previous Startup in July, Hassan felt he needed to try new things. During his break on weekends he would play around with software and at some point, he and Singh set out to build a mobile application that could aggregate customers’ financial accounts from different Nigerian banks.

But to achieve this, they needed to use an API and according to Hassan, none matched their taste.

“We couldn’t find an API that could enable us to do what we wanted. Something that was real-time and very stable,” the CEO said.

The pair decided to build the API infrastructure and then proceeded to build the application.

However, it didn’t take off as intended because when they deployed the application and began marketing, they noticed that customers didn’t want it; they wanted the API.

According to Hassan, Mono’s tech has been designed to solve these problems by counting on the speed and stability of its platform.

He further adds that the platform’s seamlessness is down to one of its most important features: its Statement Page.

With this, companies can generate a link from their Mono dashboard to share with their customers. When they click on the link, Mono immediately connects their financial accounts in real-time and shares the data with the company.

“We have stable connections and faster integrations. We also want our customers to use Mono without actually doing anything technical.”

A testament to its capabilities, Mono has signed on customers that cut across health and lending. Some of them include Carbon, OnePipe, Swipe, Anyi Health, Flutterwave, and dozens of developers.