3 weeks ago
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Google’s African Investment Fund is a new investor in African fintech Moniepoint, which just closed $110 million in new financing. The Series C round, which involved an equity sale, per Bloomberg, was led by Development Partners International’s African Development Partners (ADP) III fund.
Other investors, including African private equity firm Verod Capital and global impact firm Lightrock, and an existing investor, participated. Moniepoint, also backed by QED, has raised over $170 million since its launch in 2015.
According to the Financial Times, the round makes Moniepoint a unicorn, that is, a private company with a valuation of $1 billion or more. The African fintech was last valued at nearly $800 million in a QED-led round two years ago.
Moniepoint, initially TeamApt, focused on providing infrastructure and payment solutions for banks and financial institutions before pivoting to a business banking provider, an area where it has found remarkable success.
The African fintech provides a gamut of services to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) across Nigeria that allows them to access various features to manage operations, including working capital, business expansion loans, and business management tools such as expense management (business payment cards), accounting and bookkeeping solutions, and insurance.
In 2022, Moniepoint claimed to serve 400,000 such SMBs while processing $100 billion in annualized run-rate transactions (That same year, Moniepoint generated over $100 million in annualized revenue, a figure that should’ve doubled, barring Nigeria’s currency devaluation.) The profitable fintech now claims to process over 800 million transactions, with a monthly total value exceeding US$17 billion.
Moniepoint says it will use the new funding to accelerate its growth across Africa (90% of its business comes from Nigeria) as it builds an “all-in-one platform for African businesses of all sizes,” which includes digital payments, banking, foreign exchange (FX), credit, and business management tools. The nine-year-old fintech recently made a foray into the personal banking market and claims to have experienced 20x customer growth over the past year.
Tage Kene-Okafor is a reporter at TechCrunch based in Lagos, Nigeria, covering the intersection of startups and venture capital in Africa. Tage reported on the same beat for Techpoint Africa. He can be reached at tage(dot)techcrunch(@)gmail.com.
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