Nigerian Payment Service Provider Name has raised $30 million in a pre-Series B investment to support the delivery of bespoke payment solutions for African businesses. The round, which values the company at more than $150 million according to YCombinator data about your most valuable companieswas run by the San Francisco-based company base 10 partners.
Partech and Khosla Ventures, existing investors in its $5 million Series A round in 2019, participated, as well as new backers, including Helios Digital Ventures and Shopifywhich could be making its first investment on the continent through the Nigerian fintech.
Last May, the endorsed by YC Nomba, founded by Adeyinka Adewale and Pelumi Aboluwarin, underwent a rebrand from Kudi, which launched as a chatbot integration that responds to financial requests in social apps in 2016. It was an online solution that has since been adopted in bits by various fintechs, but it struggled to reach scale. massive in an African country where 90% of transactions in the informal economy are based on cash and over 60 million Nigerian adults they are not banked despite the proliferation of digital financial products.
Cash is still king, and Nomba changed her business two years after launching her chatbot to fit that narrative. Operating an agency banking model, it provided thousands of individuals and small business owners (who acted as its agents) with POS terminals to offer essential financial services such as cash withdrawal, transfers and bill payment to unbanked and unbanked Nigerians. banked. Fintech is much more than that now. Its name change reflects that: Kudi, the simple deposit, withdrawal and payment and collection POS system, to Nomba, an omnichannel platform with a range of commercial and management tools for different types of businesses, which are also attractive to others . fintechs that offer exchangeable services such as moniepoint, ORPay and fair money, through its acquisition of CrowdForce.
“Our primary focus has been figuring out how to help small businesses essentially scale. A lot of that depends on the type of software tools we provide that could potentially lower your cost of operation and bring better visibility to your business,” CEO Adewale told TechCrunch in an interview, mentioning that Shopify’s participation in the round it was to take advantage of the wealth of experience the global e-commerce giant has in providing small businesses with tools to scale their operations.
Nomba serves three business segments, categorized by their turnover, which relatively determines the type of payment solutions and software tools they access. First are agents and unit dealers who run retail businesses, typically with less than $100,000 in annual transaction revenue. They are typically provided with a POS terminal with immediate cash withdrawal and bill payment features, including a Nomba account and a dashboard to monitor these transactions. Another segment is midsize businesses with approximately $100,000 to a million dollars in annual transaction revenue. They gain access to Nomba’s POS terminals and software tools to reconcile payments and track receipts at various merchant outlets. Lastly are enterprise customers (typically multi-store businesses) whose transaction revenue exceeds $1 million and have access to POS capabilities and software tools for billing, order and inventory management, and APIs for payment reconciliation and processing built into your existing systems or workflows.
A Nomba merchant panel
More than 300,000 companies across all three segments use at least one Nomba-powered product, and according to the fintech, it processes $1 billion in monthly transactions. The fintech has also seen its revenue grow 150% year-over-year since 2020, Adewale revealed on the call.
The company said the new investment will allow it to offer customized payment and operational solutions designed for specific businesses, including food and restaurant companies, as well as logistics and transportation companies, to close gaps in their payment processes. Powered by a yet-to-be-released POS device called the Nomba MAX, Nomba plans to allow restaurants to access menus, manage inventory, receive payments and perform other functions from the same hardware. And for transportation and logistics companies, it will allow them to connect their transactions to payments directly.
“We know that merchants at midsize and large businesses have payment issues that are often infrastructure based. So while our solutions help them improve transaction success rates, we don’t think being a payment provider is good enough,” Adewale said of Nomba’s approach to launching Nomba MAX, which will likely compete with software verticals. as Orda and sell yourself, another Partech-backed upstart, in the restaurant management space. “The way we see it is that we need to create software that essentially makes us very valuable to these companies by reducing order time and streamlining orders in one place. And we want to understand your business from the front-end to the back office.”
Product expansion aside, the CEO also noted that Nomba, in a bid to replicate its success in Nigeria, would explore pan-African expansion. “We’re looking at a couple of markets, but it’s too early to share anything. It’s something we’re spending a lot of time on.”
Luci Fonseca, Partner at Base10, speaking on the investment, said: “Nomba’s track record of innovation and capital efficiency makes it one of the most exciting start-ups in Africa. We are delighted to support them in delivering their innovative solutions to drive the growth and continued success of businesses in Nigeria and beyond.” The venture capital firm has backed Nigerian fintech API Okra and retail automation upstart bumpa.
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