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Nigerian fintech API startup, Mono, has closed $2 million in seed investment to power the internet economy in Africa.
The investors in this seed round include Entrée Capital; Kuda’s co-founder and CEO, Babs Ogundeyi; Gbenga Oyebode, partner at TCVP; Eric Idiahi, co-founder and partner at Verod Capital; VC Lateral Capital.
This investment comes just nine months after Mono raised $500,000 in pre-seed last September and two months after receiving $125,000 from Ycombinator. The company has received a total of $2.625 million in investments.
Launched in 2020, mono helps digital businesses in Africa access their customers’ financial accounts for data and payments.
In a region where more than half of the population is either unbanked or underbanked, open finance players like Mono are trying to improve financial inclusion and connectivity on the continent.
Open finance has shown that access to a financial ecosystem via open APIs are new routes to move money, access financial information, and make borrowing decisions thereby reducing the barriers and costs of entry for the underbanked.
Mono has partnered with more than 16 financial institutions and over a hundred businesses in Nigeria like Carbon, Aella Credit, Credpal, Renmoney, Autochek, and Inflow Finance. The company accesses customers’ bank accounts for bank statements, identity data, and balances. It has also connected over 100,000 financial accounts for its partners and analyzed over 66 million financial transactions so far according to Techcrunch.
Mono is one of the three API fintech companies to have raised a seed investment this year. Last month, Nigerian fintech Okra raised $3.5 million while Stitch, a South African API fintech, launched with $4 million in February.
Avil Eyal, managing partner and co-founder of Entrée Capital, said, “We are very excited to be working with Abdul, Prakhar and the entire Mono team as they continue to build out the rails for African banking to enable the delivery of financial services to hundreds of millions of people across the African continent.”
Abdul Hassan, CEO of Mono, said “Our expansion is mostly inspired by our customers looking to expand to other markets, same with some of our products. We work with our customers to give them the right tools to build new experiences for their customers,” Hassan stated.
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