Nigerian payment service provider, Nomba, which specialises in providing affordable financial services to both banked and unbanked individuals, has officially secured a $30 million pre-Series B investment round.
The company aims to utilise the funds to develop tailor-made payment solutions for African businesses. San Francisco-based investment firm Base 10 Partners spearheaded the funding round, which also included Partech, Khosla Ventures, and new investors Helios Digital Ventures and Shopify.
Luci Fonseca, partner at Base10, expressed the company’s excitement to support Nomba in delivering game-changing solutions to power growth and continued success for businesses in Nigeria and beyond.
“Nomba’s track record of innovation and capital efficiency makes it one of the most exciting startups in Africa. We are thrilled to be supporting them to deliver their game-changing solutions to power growth and continued success for businesses in Nigeria and beyond,” he said.
Nomba evolved from Kudi.ai, a chatbot integration that responded to financial requests on social apps, into an online omnichannel payment service provider that offers management and banking tools to enable better business processes. The platform supports over 300,000 businesses and processes $1 billion in monthly transactions, representing a market-leading gross transaction value for a payment service provider in Africa.
Yinka Adewale, CEO and co-founder of Nomba, believes that effective payment solutions are essential in the hands of business owners to support their continued growth and success.
“We see payment as a business model, not just a product and we want to make it easier for businesses to take advantage of all that is possible in their payment processes to support their continued growth and success,” Yinka said. “We have a long list of products we have been working on and the funds we have raised as well as the investors that have backed us gives us a lot of confidence about what can be achieved with more effective payment solutions in the hands of business owners.”
Through their agency banking model, Nomba has also supplied thousands of POS terminals to offer essential financial services such as cash withdrawal, transfer, and bill payments to unbanked and underbanked Nigerians.
With the recent investment, Nomba aims to focus on the specific needs of various businesses such as food companies, restaurants, logistics, and transport companies to operate more efficiently and profitably by addressing the gaps in their payment processes. The funding round raised the company’s valuation to over $150 million and comes after they raised $5 million in 2019 in a Series A funding round.
Nomba intends to equip over 350,000 businesses in Nigeria with tools to help run their businesses more effectively. The company’s mission is to make payment a business model, not just a product, and to make it easier for businesses to take advantage of all that is possible in their payment processes to support their continued growth and success.
