{"id":1537,"date":"2021-06-30T05:47:13","date_gmt":"2021-06-30T05:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tablutech.co.mz\/?p=1537"},"modified":"2021-09-27T05:56:27","modified_gmt":"2021-09-27T05:56:27","slug":"nigerias-mono-raises-millions-to-power-the-internet-economy-in-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tablutech.co.mz\/pt\/2021\/06\/30\/nigerias-mono-raises-millions-to-power-the-internet-economy-in-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Nigeria\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Mono raises millions to power the internet economy in Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In February, Nigerian fintech startup\u00a0Mono<\/a>\u00a0announced its acceptance into Y Combinator and, at the time, it wanted to build the Plaid for Africa.\u00a0Three months later, the startup has a different mission: to power the internet economy in Africa. It has closed $2 million in seed investment toward that goal.<\/p>

The investment comes nine months after the company raised $500,000 in pre-seed last September and two months after receiving $125,000 from YC.\u00a0Mono\u2019s total investment moves up to $2.625 million, and investors in this new round include Entr\u00e9e Capital (one of the investors in Kuda\u2019s seed round), Kuda co-founder and CEO Babs Ogundeyi; Gbenga Oyebode, partner at TCVP; and Eric Idiahi, co-founder and partner at Verod Capital.\u00a0New York but Africa-based VC Lateral Capital also invested after taking part in Mono\u2019s pre-seed.<\/p>

In a region where more than half of the population is\u00a0either unbanked or underbanked<\/a>, open finance players like Mono are trying to improve financial inclusion and connectivity on the continent.\u00a0Open finance thrives on the notion that access to a financial ecosystem via open APIs and new routes to move money, access financial information and make borrowing decisions reduces the barriers and costs of entry for the underbanked.\u00a0<\/p>

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Launched\u00a0in August 2020, the company streamlines various financial data in a single API for companies and third-party developers.\u00a0Mono allows them to retrieve information like account statements, real-time balance, historical transactions, income, expenses and account owner identification with users\u2019 consent.<\/p>

When we covered the company early in the year, it had already secured partnerships with more than 16 financial institutions in Nigeria.\u00a0In addition to having\u00a0a little over a hundred businesses like Carbon, Aella Credit, Credpal, Renmoney, Autochek and Inflow Finance access customers\u2019 bank accounts for bank statements, identity data and balances, Mono has also\u00a0connected over 100,000 financial accounts for its partners and analyzed over 66 million financial transactions so far.<\/p>

Mono has done impressively well in a short period. While it appears to have figured out product-market fit, CEO\u00a0Abdul Hassan<\/a>\u00a0is quick to remind everyone that the burgeoning API fintech space is\u00a0just\u00a0an entry point to its pursuit of being a data company \u2014 a case he also made in February.<\/p>

\u201cThe way I see it, our market is not that big. Compare the payments market now with 2016, when Paystack and Flutterwave\u00a0just\u00a0started.\u00a0The payments space in 2016 was very small and the number of people using cards online was very small,\u201d said Hassan, who co-founded the company with\u00a0Prakhar Singh<\/a>.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s the same thing for us right now. That\u2019s why our focus isn\u2019t only on open banking but data.\u00a0We\u2019re thinking of how we can power the internet economy with data that isn\u2019t\u00a0necessarily\u00a0financial data. For instance, think about open data for telcos.\u00a0Imagine where you can move your data from one telco to another instead of getting a new SIM card and making a fresh registration. That\u2019s where I see the market going, at least for us at Mono.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>

He adds that the company is taking an approach of building a product one step at a time until it can\u00a0fully\u00a0diversify from financial data offerings, including connecting with payment gateways (Paystack and Flutterwave) and other fintechs like wealth management startups Piggyvest and Cowrywise.<\/p>

\u201cWhen you\u2019re able to connect to all the systems, a lot of use cases will come up.\u00a0The first step is how can we connect to all available data and open it up for businesses and developers,\u201d he continued.<\/p>

Therefore, Mono will use the funding to reinforce its current financial and identity data offerings and launch new products for diverse business verticals.\u00a0Also, a long-overdue pan-African expansion to Ghana and Kenya is top priority.\u00a0The last time I spoke with Hassan, the end of Q1 looked\u00a0feasible\u00a0to get into at least one of the two markets but it didn\u2019t turn out that way.\u00a0But the wait seems to be over as the company said it\u2019d be going live in Ghana next month with a handful of existing customers from Nigeria and new ones in Ghana.\u00a0Some of these partners include five banks (GTBank, Fidelity Bank and three unannounced banks) and the mobile money service arm of MTN Ghana.<\/p>

\u201cOur expansion is\u00a0mostly\u00a0inspired by our customers looking to expand to other markets, same with some of our products.\u00a0We work with our customers to give them the right tools to build new experiences for their customers,\u201d Hassan stated.\u00a0<\/p>

Mono is one of three API fintech companies to have raised a seed investment this year.\u00a0Last month, another Nigerian fintech, Okra,\u00a0closed $3.5 million<\/a>\u00a0while Stitch, a South African API fintech, launched\u00a0with $4 million<\/a>\u00a0in February.\u00a0Back to back investments like this show that investors are\u00a0incredibly\u00a0optimistic about the market. Avil Eyal, managing partner and co-founder of Entr\u00e9e Capital, one such investor, had this to say: \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>

Source<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In February, Nigerian fintech startup\u00c2\u00a0Mono\u00c2\u00a0announced its acceptance into Y Combinator and, at the time, it wanted to build the Plaid for Africa.\u00c2\u00a0Three months later, the startup has a different mission: to power the internet economy in Africa. It has closed $2 million in seed investment…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1538,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-weshare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tablutech.co.mz\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tablutech.co.mz\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tablutech.co.mz\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tablutech.co.mz\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tablutech.co.mz\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1537"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/tablutech.co.mz\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1662,"href":"https:\/\/tablutech.co.mz\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1537\/revisions\/1662"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tablutech.co.mz\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tablutech.co.mz\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tablutech.co.mz\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tablutech.co.mz\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}