Nigerian payment service provider Nomba has raised $30 million in a pre-Series B investment round to support the delivery of tailored payment solutions for businesses across Africa. The funding round was led by San Francisco-based Base 10 Partners and values the company at over $150 million, according to YCombinator data on the most valuable companies. Existing investors from Nomba’s $5 million Series A round in 2019, Partech and Khosla Ventures, also participated, as well as new backers Helios Digital Ventures and Shopify, which could be making its first investment on the continent through Nomba.
Nomba, previously known as Kudi, was founded by Adeyinka Adewale and Pelumi Aboluwarin, and underwent a rebrand last May. The company originally launched in 2016 as a chatbot integration that responds to financial requests on social apps but struggled to attain massive scale in a country where 90% of transactions in the informal economy are cash-based, and over 60 million Nigerian adults are unbanked. Nomba now operates an agency banking model, supplying thousands of individuals and small business owners acting as its agents with POS terminals to offer essential financial services such as cash withdrawal, transfer, and bill payments to unbanked and underbanked Nigerians.
Nomba serves three business segments, categorized by their turnover, which determines the type of payment solutions and software tools they access. Over 300,000 businesses across the segments use at least one Nomba-powered product, and the fintech processes $1 billion in monthly transactions. The company said the new investment would allow it to deliver tailored payment and operational solutions designed for specific businesses, including food companies and restaurants, as well as logistics and transport companies, to plug gaps in their payment processes.
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Nomba plans to enable restaurants to access menus, manage inventory, receive payments, and perform other functions from a yet-to-be-launched POS device called Nomba MAX. For transport and logistics companies, it will enable them to connect their transactions to payments directly. The company’s chief executive also noted that Nomba would explore pan-African expansion in a bid to replicate its success in Nigeria.
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Luci Fonseca, partner at Base10, said, “Nomba’s track record of innovation and capital efficiency makes it one of the most exciting startups in Africa. We are thrilled to be supporting them to deliver their game-changing solutions to power growth and continued success for businesses in Nigeria and beyond.”
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