Nigerian open banking data startup, Mono has secured $15 Series A funding round to scale across Africa.
The Series A fund is led by Tiger Global, with participation from Target Global, General catalyst, and SBI Investments.
Announcing the seed fund, one of the founders, Abdul Hassan said the raise brings Mono’s total outside funding to $17.6M.
Other funds secured:
This is not the first time the venture capital firm would be raising funds.
Last year, particularly in May, Mono raised a $2M Seed round of funding from Entrée Capital (Investors in Stripe, Gusto, Kuda) and Gbenga Oyebode’s fund (TCVP).
The startup’s existing investor, Lateral Capital also participated in the fund.
Also, one month after Mono launched, it closed a pre-seed round of $500,000.
Among those who invested in the round were Rally Cap Ventures, Lateral Capital, Golden Palm Investment, and Ventures Platform.
ALSO READ: Klasha Raises $2.4M In Seed Funding To Build Technology For Cross-border Commerce In Africa
Similarly, Mono later joined Paystack, Kobo360 and 20 other Nigerian startups in American startup accelerator Y Combinator (YC) programme.
The funding was to help Mono’s mission of becoming the go-to financial data infrastructure API platform in Africa.
Mono said the fund is to “expand coverage of our Data API to include more sources (USSD) and countries.”
Also, YC had equally invested the sum of $125,000 in Mono for 7% equity.
The funding included a goal to expose the open banking data startup to a web of global founders.
Also, YC said it would linkup Mono with global customers and investors.
Mono and Open Banking:
Mono is a financial data startup and the duo of Abdul Hassan and Prakhar Singh founded the company in 2020.
The company is a Nigerian fintech that builds APIs for open banking as well as simplify financial accounts managements for businesses and individuals.
Though open banking has been about giving third parties access to retail banking data.
Its goal is for traditional banking institutions to give customers more control over their financial data and account information.
Open banking also lets users securely share their own transaction data with third parties.
However, Hassan said Mono’s mission is to take open banking, even further from that.
According to him, “Mono is to take the notion of open banking a step further; by giving consumers the ability to grant access to all of their digital accounts across banking (GTBank, Kuda), offline channels (e.g Paga, Kudi), and traditional entities (e.g pension, telco, insurance), etc.”
Hassan said the target is making it possible to access financial accounts for data from multiple financial and non-financial sources.
He said this would help help digital businesses build innovative and more inclusive financial services.
Growth:
Mono launched in 2020 with its first product, Mono Connect that allows uers to seamlessly link their financial accounts to share their data.
Such data includes transactions, bank statements, income, and identity data.
Mono has over 200 valued customers and partners like Flutterwave, Renmoney, Aella, Credpal, Lendsqr, Float and Payhippo enjoying its services.
The startup has also delivered over 200 million units of financial data.
On scaling to other African countries:
The Nigeria CEO of Mono said the outlook is to scale to countries like Kenya, Egypt, and South Africa, having already lunched in Ghana.
Speaking further on this, Hassan said the “newly raised funds will enable us to expand our products to new countries, scale our product development efforts to meet rapidly increasing market demand and support its exponential growth, double our existing connection coverage, reaching over 50 integrations, and launch our bank-to-bank payment initiation offering in Nigeria by the end of the year.”
He revealed that the company would be launching Mono DirectPay.
Mono Direct, he said, is an innovative features and solutions that enable businesses, especially third parties, access to financial accounts.
Implication:
This seed funding will definitely help Mono achieve its mission of scaling to other African countries with its financial solutions.
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