Indicina Technologies, a Lagos-based digital lending platform has secured $150k from Itanna, the venture capital arm of Honeywell Group. The new financing will accelerate the startup’s continued expansion within Nigeria, as well as support further development of their proprietary technology platform and their pursuit of expansion opportunities in other African markets.
Why The Investor Invested
A core component of the Honeywell Group’s overall innovation strategy, Itanna is an investment fund that provides expertise, market connections, institutional knowledge, and capital required to enable innovative teams to build trailblazing enterprises. Itanna operates from the Enterprise Factory located in Lagos, Nigeria, working with start-ups at every stage of maturity to provide the tools, resources, and expertise they need to succeed. The initiative is broad-based and includes a community and an accelerator programme, as well as a growth fund.
“The credit lending industry needs innovative, industry-leading tools to tackle the unique challenges presented to lenders in developing countries,” said Tomi Otudeko, Director of Itanna. “What Indicina and the team have developed over the last two years is hugely impressive, and we’re excited to be working together to create a global market leader. Indicina is a great example of the type of founder-led, capital-efficient business that we like to invest in.”
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A Look At What Indicina Does
Co-founded in 2018 by Yvonne Johnson and Yemi Ajao, Indicina is an Africa-focused digital lending platform that provides analytics-driven credit decision for lenders. It utilises a proprietary machine learning decision engine to quickly identify and reject potentially bad loans during the application and underwriting process. Therefore, enabling lenders to make real-time lending decisions with improved risk outcomes.
Indicina’s flagship product, Originate, is an innovative full-stack lending-as-a-service platform utilising machine learning to drive a digitally led consumer finance strategy.
With rapid product development as a key focus, Indicina will continue to develop Originate to advance digitisation of the credit value chain across all customer segments and allowing lenders, bank and non-bank, to underwrite risk intelligently, helping to improve default rates within the industry. The Originate platform can manage the entire process from customer acquisition, operations and underwriting, portfolio management, to loss management. The rising demand for digital tools across the continent, presents an opportunity for Indicina to explore the deployment of Originate in other African markets.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer