The funding was led by Flourish, a venture of The Omidyar Group, the partners of DST Global, and existing seed investors Newfund, Speedinvest, and Le Studio VC.
Launched in 2017, FairMoney started as a mobile app that uses alternative smartphone data to underwrite micro credit in Nigeria. Today, it served more customers, putting the figure at 200,000 and finance small business needs.
Laurin Hainy, CEO of FairMoney, told Business Insider SSA in an email note that part of the funding will be used to expand operations to Ghana, Egypt, Kenya. He said the company facilitates more than 400 payments daily through its various features – digital wallet and in-app payment function
“Our vision is to build a holistic financial platform for underserved customers in emerging markets. We want to do that by offering an easy-to-use product to our customers and become a financial one-stop-shop for them.
“We started with credit for small business owners and individuals, and we are expanding our services rapidly. Think digital bank for emerging market consumers,” he said.
FairMoney to scale engineering team with funds
The company said the funds raised in this round will be used to scale the company’s engineering team to develop a fully-fledged mobile banking offering in Nigeria and beyond.
More than 2 billion people globally have limited access to financial services and working capital, according to the World Bank. In Africa, access to a loan is extremely limited due to absent of credit score and overbearing requests from the traditional financial institutions.
In Nigeria, there are more than 50 financial service providers with competing rates for borrowers. Any believed this will move unbanked population into the financial space. FairMoney gives as low as N12,000 low and up to N150,000 depending on customer's loan record and track of repayment
