Anchor, a Nigerian fintech firm offering banking as a service, has secured $1 million in pre-seed investment.
Byld Ventures, Y Combinator, Luno Expeditions, Niche Capital, Mountain Peak Capital, and angel investors like SeamlessHR CEO Emmanuel Okeleji support the BaaS fintech.
The Y Combinator-backed business intends to utilise this funding to hire top people, upgrade its technological foundation, invest in compliance and regulatory infrastructure, and gain new clients.
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Why The Investors Invested
The fintech sector experience of the co-founder, Segun Adeyemi, seems to have persuaded investors. Adeyemi had previously co-founded Amplifypay, a business that specialised in recurring payments and direct debit in 2015. Amplifypay was bought by Carbon, one of the biggest digital banks in Africa, in 2019. He also worked with JUMO, the largest provider of credit infrastructure in Africa, between 2019 and 2021. He equally provided advice to some of Nigeria’s largest fintech companies and digital banks during this time.
But the investors seem equally to have been drawn in by the startup’s traction. According to Anchor, monthly revenue is increasing by 200% while it transacts several million dollars. The startup generates income by collecting fees and taking a portion of every billable service provided, including account opening, money transfers, savings, and deposits.
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As the first banking-as-a-service platform from the continent, Anchor, which was also accepted into Y Combinator’s summer batch this year, launched its private beta in May. It was accessible by more than 30 startups, including Pennee, Pivo (another YC S22-backed business) Outpost Health, and Dillali.
A Look At What The Startup Does
Founded in February 2022 by Segun Adeyemi, Olamide Sobowale, and Gbekeloluwa Olufotebi, Anchor provides APIs, dashboards, and tools that help developers embed and build banking products such as bank accounts, funds transfers, savings products, issuing cards, and offering loans., Anchor provides APIs, dashboards and tools that help developers embed and build banking products such as bank accounts, funds transfers, savings products, issuing cards and offering loans.
“After months of building and talking to our early customers, we are excited to be coming out of private beta and launching our public beta with a pre-seed round led by Byld Ventures. Also, we got into Y Combinator Summer 2022 batch as the first banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform from Africa. At Anchor, we provide API and tools for businesses to create accounts, transfer funds, offer savings, issue cards, and do more for their customers. This enables them to grow revenues by offering and embedding financial services within their products,” Segun Adeyemi said.
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“We’re now seeing a new development where businesses want to offer different products and financial services beyond just payments. We strongly believe that the way is not just by latching banking-as-a-service on a payments platform, but there has to be proper banking as a service platform built with the right infrastructure and go-to-market strategy. That’s the problem we decided to solve as a team, basically the full end-to-end infrastructure for startups to be able to build, embed, and launch financial services.”
Banking-as-a-service Anchor
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