Pngme, a San Francisco and Africa-based fintech API startup, has raised another $15 million for its financial data infrastructure play, less than a year after its $3 million seed round.
Octopus Ventures, based in London, led the Series A financing, with Lateral Capital, EchoVC, and Raptor Group joining as follow-on investors. Unshackled Ventures, Future Africa, and Two Small Fish Ventures were among the other investors who took part. Pngme also got funding from angel investors, including RallyCap’s Hayden Simmons, Plaid’s Dan Kahn, RBC Capital’s Richard Talbot, and Intersect VC’s Kyle Ellicott.
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With the completion of Pngme’s Series A, the company now has a total investment of $18.5 million, making it the most well-funded fintech API company on the continent. Other notable startups include Stitch, located in South Africa, and Okra, Mono, and OnePipe, based in Nigeria.
“What we do is that we’ve kind of really differentiated ourselves to be not just collecting the data that we can see but also, we can connect to Mono data, Okra data, and we can connect with banks’ data. We essentially merge all that data and then put machine learning models on top for the clients. That can be predictive credit models, segmentation models and really positioning ourselves as a data processing infrastructure for banks and fintechs,” said co-founder Brendan Playford.
Pngme plans to use the funds to expand its customer base, according to the company. The corporation intends to accomplish this in part by extending its executive staff. Lorraine Kageni Maina will be the CSO, while Nick Masson will be the CTO, at Pngme.
Why The Investors Invested
Investors were mostly attracted because of the traction the startup has garnered over time and the recent seed round of the startup.
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Pngme’s infrastructure has processed billions of data points from hundreds of financial institutions across Sub-Saharan Africa, according to the company’s COO Cate Rung. The company also plans to double down on its Insights Library product in the coming year and expand its third-party data connections to other industries.
Pngme’s offering has also gained traction with tier-one banks in Nigeria and South Africa, such as ABSA, UBA, and First Bank, as well as fintechs Kuda, Umba, Renmoney, CredPal, and credit agencies such as TransUnion Africa.
“The elegance of the technology solution, combined with an exceptional team and strong market traction with large institutions underlines our belief that Pngme will power the next generation of financial services in Africa, helping to give millions of more people access to banking and lending,” said Tosin Agbabiaka of Octopus Ventures.
A Look At What The Startup Does
Founded in 2018 byBrendan Playford and Cate Rung, financial institutions and fintechs can use Pngme to collect and aggregate financial data on a large scale. The company claims that its mobile SDK and data processing pipelines capture alternative financial data and combine it with information from other sources to provide a comprehensive picture of a person’s financial behavior.
“The pain point we solve is the cost of building the infrastructure is very high. And the data science, the data engineering talent, just globally is really hard to find. So building a data infrastructure as a service works really well because it’s a subscription to get those services which you’d normally need a five- or six-person team to build this structure.”
Pngme currently offers three main products to clients in these three markets.
Pngme has launched a client management platform to its already well-known API and mobile SDK. The company claims that by merging the three items, users will be more likely to accept and employ individualized user experiences and financial products.
fintech API Pngme fintech API Pngme
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