Cameroonian fintech startup Diool has raised $3.5 million in funding to scale its operations. The startup's early days back in 2015 was in mobile recharging. Diool, starting out as a mobile recharge project, offered small merchants a way to sell prepaid recharges to their customers from a single app. The startup eventually pivoted into financial services aggregation after a realization that payment interchanges and financial services access was the pain point of its target users.
Diool's platform makes it simpler for small merchants to accept payments from their customers and repay their suppliers, using many payment methods. The startup has, in the two years since the pivot, signed up more than 2,000 merchants, who have transacted more than US$120 million via its platform. It has payments integrations with all mobile money providers in Cameroon, and a regulatory partnership with French multinational investment bank and financial services company Societe Generale.
Now, the startup has announced raising in funding $3.5 million from the Lundin family plus existing investors, taking its total secured investment to US$4.6 million.
Serge Boupda, Diool's CEO, said the startup's goal is to build a simpler way to access financial services for small merchants in Africa.
“We’re doing Cameroon and payments first,” he said. “We’ve also spent some time rebuilding operational architecture and processes, to match new payments regulations in Cameroon – a critical building block for financial services distribution in the region.”
With the funding on board, Diool is now working on expanding at home, before raising further funding and scaling internationally.
According to Boupda, “Our next stage is growing the team and product to scale in Cameroon ahead of entering other countries.”
Cameroon in focus:
Population: 25.8 million (2019)
GDP: $39 billion (2019)
GDP Per Capita: $1507 (2019)
