Maplerad, a Nigerian fintech touted as a global Banking-as-a-service (BaaS) provider targeting Africa, has secured $6 million in initial investment. According to insiders, Maplerad, which is emerging from stealth, raised the round at a $30 million value.
After Kuda and Yellow Card, the Peter Thiel-founded venture capital firm led Maplerad’s seed round. Golden Palm Investments Corporation, Michael Vaughn (ex-COO, Venmo), Fintech Fund, Babs Ogundeyi (CEO, Kuda), Armyn Capital, Dunbar Capital, Strawhat Investment, Polymath Capital, Unpopular Ventures, Sean Mahsoul, and MyAsiaVC are among the other investors in the round. The founders stated that they also put money into the firm.
The startup intends to utilise the funding to gain more clients now that it is no longer in stealth mode, obtain further licences, increase its personnel, and strengthen its footprint across Africa.
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Why The Investors Invested
While in stealth mode, Maplerad handled millions of dollars every month for over 100 firms added to its platform, including startups like Pastel, Spleet, Bridgecard, Onboardly, Vella, Crowdforce, Dojah, GetEquity, and a few banks.
Maplerad founders cited the platform’s “wider variety of banking partnerships,” “second-to-none technology,” and “best institutional investors/partners,” as its competitive advantages.
Speaking about the investment, James Fitzgerald, a partner at Valar Ventures, said that while the continent’s economies are maturing, “there’s a huge opportunity for Maplerad, which is the best-in-class banking as a service solution to provide businesses with the financial infrastructure to scale across Africa and globally quickly and seamlessly.”
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A Look At What The Startup Does
Maplerad’s history can be traced back to 2020, when the company’s first product, Wirepay, was released. The software began by assisting users in making international payments by providing cross-border payment alternatives in both fiat and cryptocurrency. It has subsequently evolved into a self-described all-in-one finance platform, allowing users to receive, hold, and make payments in many currencies, as well as create virtual and real cards and pay bills. Miracle Anywanwu and Obinna Chukwujioke created the company.
Wirepay raised an unknown pre-seed round last year, including a $125,000 check from OnDeck. Other investors in the round included Golden Palm Investments Corporation, Greenhouse Capital, certain Stash executives, and Berrywood Capital.
Anywanwu stated that as Wirepay grew to over 50,000 customers, primarily in Nigeria, businesses began to question about the in-house technology underpinning the services on its consumer app.
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“People wanted to use the infrastructure powering Wirepay, our license coverages, and banking relationships,” the CEO and CTO stated.
Anywanwu further claimed that Maplerad (the parent firm) has always sought to sell this infrastructure to other companies. However, after receiving a flood of outside demands, they agreed to beta-launch Maplerad, the infra product that lets enterprises to incorporate strong financial services such as accounts, payments, FX, and cards into their products, this August.
“From day one, when we built Wirepay for our consumers, we knew the end move would be infrastructural even though we didn’t start the business infrastructure first. For anyone to build anything finance-related, they have a whole lot of banking stack that they have to start with and even before integrating features, they have to go past many hurdles,” said the chief executive. “One of them is banking relationships and compliance. The other is licencing. So Maplerad is solving financial infrastructure problems for these businesses in Africa. We handle that whole stack and provide the best-in-class APIs to use that can make you launch a financial product within five minutes. So instead of a company spending 8 months and a couple of million dollars to start building a fintech product, you can integrate with our APIs and go live.”
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