Yesterday Cellulant announced a new deal record Series C financing round to grow the digital payments company into markets on the African continent where two-thirds of the population remains unbanked.
The investment deal for $47.5 million (Kshs 4.8) billion was led by the TPG Rise Fund alongside Endeavor Catalyst and Satya Capital. The company is now in 11 countries in Africa and reaching 40 million customers. These include 7 million farmers on Agrikore an agri-business platform in Nigeria.
A recent report on the financing of fintech companies released by the East Africa Venture Capital Association (EAVCA) noted that there were trends towards the financing of non-traditional companies, who were involved in decentralized networks and enabling the use of alternative data to develop new scoring models. Also that once such companies enabled customers to have mobile wallets, their usage can be more frequent and the platforms can be extended towards government, utilities and other payments. The report noted other recent large financing deals included $80 million (of debt) to M-Kopa, the pay-as-you-go-solar firm and $65 million to Branch, the lending app.
The team at the signing go the Cellulant financing deal.
Part of the new funding will go towards building a world-class payments team, according to Ken Njoroge, the co-founder and Group CEO of Cellulant. The new investors join the other shareholders at Celluant who are Velocity Capital, Progression Capital Africa, and TBL Mirror Fund while representatives of the TPG Rise Fund will join the board of Cellulant. Other TPG Growth investments in Africa include Gro Intelligence (an agricultural data business firm), Frontier (a platform which powers Cars45, a second-hand car-sale site in Nigeria) and Ecoles Yassamine (a Moroccan private school network).
Read more on this at the Cellulant blog.
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