Grey, a payments startup that offers African freelancers and remote workers virtual international bank accounts, has announced that it has raised $2 million in seed funding.
Venture capital firms including Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Heirloom Fund, and True Culture Fund are among the investors in the round, as well as angel investors like Alan Rutledge, Samvit Ramadurgam, and Karthik Ramakrishnan. Startups like PayDay, which is supported by Techstars, provide comparable services.
“Grey was founded to empower people to live a location-independent lifestyle. “I believe that the least of your worries as a freelancer, remote worker, or digital nomad should be sending or receiving payments, so we’ve made it easy,” said CEO Idorenyin Obong. “We like to say that we’re on a mission to make international payments as easy as sending an email. We want to do impactful work to improve how Africa as a continent interacts with money across its borders.
The firm received an unknown pre-seed investment last year, and in March it was accepted into YC’s winter batch.
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For the past two months, Grey Business has been in private beta; the seed financing will aid in its public launch in Nigeria and Kenya.
Why The Investors Invested
The firm says that since its founding, it has gained a lot of traction. Grey claims to have 100,000 individual users, and its transaction volumes have grown by 200% since the start of the year.
A Look At What The Startup Does
Grey was established in July 2020 by Idorenyin Obong and Femi Aghedo as a rapid exchange service to assist Nigerians in converting foreign currency in their domiciliary accounts into local currency, the naira.
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The Nigerian fintech, which was sponsored by YC, has subsequently moved into East Africa, starting in Kenya. CEO Obong told TechCrunch that the move was accompanied by partnerships with two Kenyan businesses: edtech startup Moringa and payments juggernaut Cellulant.
“We went with Cellulant to power our payment infrastructure for Kenyan shillings,” said the chief executive. “Moringa is like an avenue and channel for training new tech talent, so it made sense to have such a partnership as we are trying to build this for freelancers.”
Therefore, users in Nigeria and Kenya can use USD, GBP, and EUR bank accounts created on the platform to receive foreign payments from over 88 countries, convert them into their local currencies (naira and shilling), and withdraw them directly to their mobile money or local bank account. On the site, users may send money to the UK and Europe. The functionality of Grey has also been improved to accept payouts in Ugandan shillings, an additional East African currency, increasing the total supported currencies to six. Obong stated that Tanzania, another nation in East Africa, is included in Grey’s geographical scope even though the country has not yet seen its official debut. The fintech will grow into Tanzania within a month, he continued.
In order to supplement this consumer-facing development and broaden the company’s product offerings beyond remittances and person-to-person payments, COO Aghedo stated that the company secretly developed a business-focused product, Grey Business.
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One reason firms across the continent prefer the dollar to pay one another instead of local currencies is the absence of currency interoperability. This issue is being addressed by platforms like Verto, a worldwide B2B payments network that enables African firms to send and receive money internationally using multicurrency wallets. The one-year-old fintech company wants to break into the market with its Grey Business product by giving micro and small enterprises an affordable way to transfer and receive local currencies across the continent.
Grey Remote payments Grey Remote payments
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