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Nigeria’s Kuda Technologies raised $25 million in a Series A funding round led by Valar Ventures with participation from Target Global and other investors. Co-headquartered in London and Lagos, Nigeria, Kuda offers mobile-first banking services to help people from the African diaspora manage their money and credit digitally. Kuda’s services are currently only live in Nigeria and this is the first African startup that Valar has financially backed. Kuda’s CEO Babs Ogundeyi says the company plans to use the Series A to expand its credit offerings, add more integrations to its platform, build services excessively for businesses and expand to more markets. “Nigeria is at a tipping point in the adoption of digital banking,” Andrew McCormack, a general partner and co-founder at Valar, told TechCrunch . “With the rapidly growing, youthful population who are open to new financial alternatives, Kuda is well-positioned to benefit and will transform the landscape of African banking.” This...
Payment technology company Promise secured more than $20 million in a Series A funding round last month. With this fresh investment, the company’s co-founder and CEO Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins told AfroTech that she has big growth plans moving forward. Promise launched in 2017 and its original focus at that time was creating payment technology for the criminal justice system to help scale bail reform. Ellis-Lamkins said the company did that for about a year and a half before making a pivot after participating in Y Combinator’s Spring 2018 cohort. Promise has since created a payment solution that makes customizable plans and offers digital payment options to users who need to make government payments like parking tickets, child support, utilities and more. Ellis-Lamkins said this idea came to her when she was in New Orleans and realized people were in jail for simple parking tickets. She realized the same issue was happening in Oakland, where her company is based. After doing some...
