San Francisco- and Africa-based fintech Pngme has bagged $15 million for its financial data infrastructure play. The round comes less than a year after the startup snapped $3 million in a seed round, taking the total investment in the startup to $18.5 million. What this implies is that Pngme is now the most funded in this fintech category across the continent. Other prominent startups include South African-based Stitch, and Nigeria’s Okra, Mono, and OnePipe.
Octopus Ventures led the Series A round, with follow-on investment from Lateral Capital, EchoVC, Raptor Group, and Two Small Fish Ventures. Other investors like Unshackled Ventures, Future Africa, Lagos-based Aruwa Capital, and The51 participated too. Pngme also received checks from angel investors; some include Hayden Simmons of RallyCap, Plaid’s Dan Kahn, Richard Talbot, ex-COO of RBC Capital Markets, and Kyle Ellicott of Intersect VC.
For Octopus Ventures, the lead investor in this round, Pngme shows the need for actionable data to drive the explosion of digital fintech services for Africans.
On why the VC firm invested, Tosin Agbabiaka said, “The elegance of the technology solution, combined with an exceptional team and strong market traction with large institutions underlines our belief that Pngme will power the next generation of financial services in Africa, helping to give millions of more people access to banking and lending.”
Pngme will use the investment to acquire more customers, it says. One way the company plans to make this happen is by expanding its executive team. Pngme is hiring Lorraine Kageni Maina as the CSO and Nick Masson as the CTO.
Alongside key executive hires, Pngme is expanding its data science, engineering, and sales teams globally. COO Rung says Pngme’s infrastructure has processed billions of data points from hundreds of financial institutions across sub-Saharan Africa. The next plan is to double down on its Insights Library product and expand its third-party data connections to other markets over the next year.
Sub-Saharan Africa in focus
GDP: $1.686 trillion in 2020 compared to $1.77 trillion in 2019
Population: 1.136 billion in 2020 compared to 1.107 billion in 2019
GDP per capita: $1,483 in 2020 compared to $1,559 in 2019
