Nigerian credit lending startup Creditchek, that enables both digital and traditional leaders reliably verify identity and assess the creditworthiness of potential customers, has raised $240,000 in pre-seed funding led by Atom Capital with participation from Aidi Ventures, Ham Serunjogi of Chippercash, Olumide Ogunsanwo of Adamantium Fund, Damola Adegboyega of Assembly Investors, Isaac Ewaleifoh of Launch Africa Ventures and Ogundiran Kayode.
A Look At What The Startup Does
Creditchek, founded in 2021 by Kingsley Ibe and Lionel Orishane, provides three product features that digital lenders can incorporate into their applications or websites, as well as a no-code platform for traditional less smart enterprises.
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Clients can use its Income Insight feature to examine the user’s financial condition, acquire crucial insights on cash flow, and ascertain income to establish appropriate financing. Its Identity function also allows organisations to discover their customers’ true identities by leveraging BVN, NIN, and other real-time sources. Creditchek’s Credit Insight function uses past credit data from many sources to provide crucial insights into the borrower’s credit and debt condition.
The startup pivoted from its first version in December 2021 and onboarded a few hundred customers in the first two weeks after realising that the business model demanded a high cost of acquisition and a lot more to maintain the users.
The startup debuted its MVP in beta in April 2022, testing it with a few businesses and making iterations. During its Beta period, it onboarded 30 organisations and processed thousands of API calls before exiting in June 2022.
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Prior to starting CreditChek, Ibe founded MicroMoni in 2019, a lending firm that provided micro-loans to MSMEs. One of MicroMoni’s main issues was high NPL due to poor credit information: for every 10 loans it disbursed, 4–6 of those loans returned as bad loans, severely limiting the startup’s ability to disburse more loans, according to the founder.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexperts.com/view_expert/charles-rapulu-udoh