Just nine months after the company raised $500,000 in pre-seed last September and two months after receiving $125,000 from YC. Mono’s total investment moves up to $2.625 million, and investors in this new round include Entrée Capital (one of the investors in Kuda’s seed round), Kuda co-founder and CEO Babs Ogundeyi; Gbenga Oyebode, partner at TCVP; and Eric Idiahi, co-founder and partner at Verod Capital. New York but Africa-based VC Lateral Capital also invested after taking part in Mono’s pre-seed.
Launched publicly by Founders Abdul Hassan, a former product manager at Paystack, and Prakhar Singh. The company’s technology enables businesses and individuals to gain access to financial information of their users, such as account statements, stored at commercial banks with the user’s consent . Mono is one of out a number of startups creating open banking solutions in Nigeria.
However, the goal for Mono is much bigger than facilitating financial transactions,it plans on becoming a data company, Co-founder Hassan revealed while talking to TechCrunch“The way I see it, our market is not that big. Compare the payments market now with 2016, when Paystack and Flutterwave just started. The payments space in 2016 was very small and the number of people using cards online was very small,”
“It’s the same thing for us right now. That’s why our focus isn’t only on open banking but data. We’re thinking of how we can power the internet economy with data that isn’t necessarily financial data. For instance, think about open data for telcos. Imagine where you can move your data from one telco to another instead of getting a new SIM card and making a fresh registration. That’s where I see the market going, at least for us at Mono.”
The money raised would be used to strengthen its current financial and identity data offerings, and launch new products for diverse business verticals.
The funds would also be used for its expansion into Kenya and Ghana. As reported by TechCrunch, Mono will be launched in Ghana in June 2021 where they already have five banks and MTN Ghana’s mobile money service as partners.
