Nigerian Fintech Start-Up Mono Secures $2 Million In Funding To Expand The Growth Of The Internet In Africa
Nigerian Fintech Start-Up Mono Secures $2 Million In Funding To Expand The Growth Of The Internet In Africa. In February, Nigerian fintech start-up Mono announced its acceptance into Y Combinator and, at the time, it wanted to build the Plaid for Africa. Three months later, the start-up has a different mission: to power the internet economy in Africa and has closed $2 million in seed investment towards that goal.
According to Tech Crunch, 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. Mono’s total investment moves up to $2.625 million, and investors in this new round include Entrée Capital (one of the investors in Kuda’s seed round), Kuda co-founder and CEO Babs Ogundeyi; Gbenga Oyebode, partner at TCVP; and Eric Idiahi, co-founder and partner at Verod Capital. New York but Africa-based VC Lateral Capital also invested after taking part in Mono’s pre-seed.
“The way I see it, our market is not that big. Compare the payments market now with 2016, when Paystack and Flutterwave just started. The payments space in 2016 was very small and the number of people using cards online was very small,” Abdul Hassan, who co-founded the company with Prakhar Singh told Tech Crunch. “It’s the same thing for us right now. That’s why our focus isn’t only on open banking but data. We’re thinking of how we can power the internet economy with data that isn’t necessarily financial data. For instance, think about open data for telcos. Imagine where you can move your data from one telco to another instead of getting a new SIM card and making a fresh registration. That’s where I see the market going, at least for us at Mono.”
“When you’re able to connect to all the systems, a lot of use cases will come up. The first step is how can we connect to all available data and open it up for businesses and developers,” he continued. Therefore, Mono will use the funding to reinforce its current financial and identity data offerings and launch new products for diverse business verticals. Also, a long-overdue pan-African expansion to Ghana and Kenya is top priority.
