Venture capital firm, Microtraction, headed by Yele Bademosi has invested an undisclosed amount in digital savings platform, Cowrywise. The firm, for a while has been accepting applications for investments from startups that have a technical co-founder. This investment in Cowrywise serves as their first ever.
Cowrywise is a digital savings platform that allow users to automatically save from their bank accounts. This is done as simply as signing up, setting your savings rates and connecting your bank account. Interest rates on your savings are very attractive and probably better than the banks.
According to a blog post by the founder, Yele Bademosi, he pointed out that “what we like about this market opportunity is just how big it is. Africa has an estimated population 1.7B, and by 2050 we would have added another 1.3B people. We believe access to basic financial services is a fundamental human need and there is a massive opportunity to make it easier to save and democratise wealth management for every human on the continent.”
Yele had also pointed out the experience of the co-founders (both having a background in finance) as a factor in all these. According to him, “Looking at their background and having had conversations with them, I felt both founders had not only the right mind set but the skillset, the understanding of the problem and market opportunity. Most importantly they understood that financial engineering was equally, maybe even more, important than just the technology of their product.”
In an interview, last year, co-founder and CEO Razaq Ahmed talking about what Cowrywise would be in 5 years said that, “CowryWise will evolve into a full-fledged, tech-enabled financial service provider making personal wealth management mainstream service. We believe everyone can save, and should save as an important foundation to building a secured financial future.”
We believe also that Microtraction have made a very vital investment, and Cowrywise would surely be better for it. As there’s now better financial ground for scale, and new products launch and so on.