TeamApt, a Nigerian fintech company that offers platforms for business payments and banking, has raised over $50 million, according to reliable sources.
QED Investors, a venture capital firm specialising in fintech, led the funding round. Novastar Ventures (co-lead), Lightrock, and BII, previous investors from the company’s Series B last year (Crunchbase values it at $30 million+), all took part in this round.
The company is still reportedly looking to raise a Series C next year, so even while TeamApt wouldn’t assign a “letter” to this most recent round, it might be referred to be a pre-Series C round.
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Tosin Eniolorunda, the CEO of the company, said that TeamApt would be able to expand its credit services with the aid of the new fundraising round. Due to the company’s continued use of the microfinance bank subsidiary’s balance sheet as collateral, its loan portfolio is still quite tiny. However, the company expects to use a variety of financing partnerships, including banks, development finance organisations, and securitization structures, to obtain financial facilities as its portfolio grows.
Why The Investors Invested
As one of the largest fintechs in Africa (in terms of revenue and market valuation), TeamApt was bootstrapped for four years before raising a venture round in 2019. It is also profitable. According to insiders, the company had annualised revenue of over $100 million last year and experienced an almost four-fold increase in valuation from its prior priced round.
“I am proud to bring Africa to QED and QED to Africa. I could not think of a better way to enter the continent than with our investment in TeamApt,” said Gbenga Ajayi, QED Investors partner and head of Africa, in a statement. “Tosin and his team have steadily built an impressive payment and distribution network across Nigeria over the past five years. Their strong and positive unit economics, coupled with a deep customer focus, will enable them to continue to build out an even more expansive network.”
QED has funded more than 180 companies and has approximately $5 billion in assets under management (AUM) and a newly completed 7th fund worth $1.05 billion (of which 27 are unicorns). Gbenga Ajayi and Chidinma “Chid” Iwueke were hired by QED in January to oversee its investments in Africa, a step uncommon for Western VCs. Co-founder and managing partner of the company Nigel Morris claimed that Africa was the final component needed to complete QED’s transformation into a global VC firm specialising in fintech.
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For portfolio businesses like Brazil’s Nubank and India’s Jupiter, which fulfil Eniolorunda’s definition of a lead investor, QED is also a well-known credit operator and has assisted in building solid credit operations. In a January interview, QED stated that it expects upcoming portfolio companies to “take advantage of its specialisation in fintech, operational expertise, and willingness to roll up its sleeves” to build and scale financial products for Africa’s needs, which is precisely at the core of TeamApt’s business.
A Look At What TeamApt Does
With its products Moniepoint and Monnify, TeamApt, a 2015 startup, runs one of Nigeria’s biggest business banking and payments platforms and conducts transactions worth $100 billion on average annually. Currently, Moniepoint offers 400,000 small and medium-sized businesses in Nigeria access to a range of features to help them manage their operations, including working capital, loans for business expansion, and tools for managing expenses like business payment cards, accounting and bookkeeping solutions, and insurance.
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“From our bootstrapping days, we built products where we can see positive unit economics from day one, which has continued to be reflected in our profitability,” the chief executive said. “This has put us in the realm of the few attractive cash-flow-positive hyper-growth companies — even as we continue growing at triple digits year-on-year, while at the same time expanding our margins.”
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