The venture capital firm HAVAÍC, which has its headquarters in Cape Town, has successfully concluded its third investment in the Kenyan fintech company Tanda. The contribution from the company’s HAVAÍC Universum Core African Fund, which has a total asset value of $20 million, is being made as part of an ongoing pre-series A round in cooperation with three additional investors, one of which is DFS Lab.
Tanda is well positioned to continue solving two of Africa’s most significant growth challenges with the ongoing support of HAVAÍC. These challenges include digitising retail payments to facilitate transactions that are quicker, cheaper, and more convenient, and giving small businesses and unbanked Africans access to essential financial services such as financing, savings, and wealth management. Tanda is well positioned to continue solving these challenges.
Read also Kenyans Solutech Expands Presence Across 8 African Countries
Because of the financing, the firm will be able to expedite product development, invest in key strategic partners, and grow operations in Kenya and East Africa over the course of the next 15 months.
In addition to this, Tanda is rolling out a new brand identity in order to better represent its developing product portfolio. These products include Tanda Trader, which is an app that allows businesses to accept payments, sell digital products, and access financing; Tanda Pocket, which is a virtual wallet with digital cards that can be used to spend, track finances, and budget; and Tanda I/O, which is an API library that simplifies how businesses collect and allocate payments across agents, mobile networks, and utility service providers
Read also South African Crowd-farming Fintech Livestock Wealth Raises $552K
The investment follows two previous rounds, one in 2020 and one in 2019, all of which were led by HAVAÍC, which was the initial investor in Tanda.
Why HAVAIC Invested
“Tanda is a huge win for tech companies in Africa,” says Rob Heath, partner at HAVAÍC. “With no access to financial services, people and merchants in Africa deal almost exclusively in cash. Tanda’s tech enables them to pay and receive cash in exchange for digital services that would otherwise have been out of reach. We are so pleased our journey with Tanda continues. And we cannot wait to see what the future holds.”
The news comes after HAVAIC’s recent investments in FinAccess, ShopEx, and Talk360, which add to the growing portfolio of 17 early-stage, high-potential African digital firms owned by the venture capital firm.
The portfolio firms managed by HAVAIC are currently catering to a total of five million clients in more than 180 countries throughout the world. In 2021, the portfolio was successful in raising new capital to the tune of 110 million dollars and boosted its revenue by 160 percent. To this day, HAVIAC has successfully completed four overseas exits, generating annualised returns that are far higher than its yearly objective of 30%.
A Look At What Tanda Does
Tanda has established one of Africa’s largest open agent networks that is available to all financial service providers, streamlined how consumers and companies interact, and opened up the ecosystem so that other developers may layer new products since it first launched in 2018.
Over the course of the previous four years, the company has handled more than four million transactions. Additionally, it has assisted more than 30,000 enterprises, 800,000 individuals, and over one hundred developers, including Twiga Foods and Bento.
“Our new products and growing distribution will open up opportunities for Tanda and our ecosystem partners to continue solving challenges for the majority of Africans locked out of the formal financial services ecosystem. We also look forward to deepening our customer relationships and growing into new and exciting African markets,” Tanda founder and chief executive Geoffrey Mulei says.
Tanda Kenyan Tanda Kenyan
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