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Nigerian B2B Payment Platform Duplo Raises $4.3M In Seed Capital

September 1, 2022

Duplo, a Nigerian B2B payment platform that digitises payment processes, has acquired $4.3 million in seed capital to launch new products and grow into new industry sectors.

Liquid2 Ventures, Soma Capital, Tribe Capital, Commerce Ventures, Basecamp Fund, and Y Combinator were among the investors in the seed round. Oui Capital also re-invested after previously investing in the round.

Yele Oyekola, cofounder and CEO of Duplo

With this fresh funding, the firm plans to improve its existing products, develop new products such as cross-border payments, and expand into other sectors.

Why The Investors Invested

Since its inception, the firm has gained significant traction. According to Yele Oyekola, cofounder and CEO of Duplo, the company’s monthly payment volume has climbed by 4,000% since its $1.3 million pre-seed earlier this year, and its client base has increased by over 1,000% in the last three months.

“The Duplo team has built an incredible suite of products that improves how businesses make and receive payments from each other, and the growth that the company has experienced since our initial pre-seed investment in 2021 has been nothing short of impressive. It is for this reason that we are excited to back Duplo once more,” Peter Oriaifo, Principal at Oui Capital, said.

Oyekola, the startup’s co-founder, is also a serial entrepreneur. Oyekola had previously worked at Carbon, where he helped create the first iterations of Carbon Zero, a buy-now-pay-later product. He also co-founded Julla, an East African buy-now-pay-later product. Although Julla failed after a year, Oyekola said the skills he acquired were critical in helping him co-found Duplo.

The business was also a part of the Winter 22 batch at Y Combinator.

A Look At What The Startup Does

FMCG distributors may add merchants to the Duplo platform, which was founded in 2021 by Yele Oyekola and Tunde Akinnuwa, making it easier for them to take payments online and obtain real-time business performance statistics. They may also use the platform to automate payments to vendors, manufacturers, and suppliers, and they can trade in bigger numbers with immediate payments.

Duplo’s all-in-one solution also automates the process of issuing and processing invoices, receiving and approving bills, collecting and disbursing payments, and completing account reconciliation for finance departments.

Duplo mostly works in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector, but Oyekola believes the firm could diversify into other areas such as construction, telecommunications, and healthcare.

According to Oyekola, he noticed the need for Duplo when his grandmother experienced fraud and theft for years as a Nestle distributor in Osun State, Nigeria. Duplo has been assisting FMCG distributors, mid-sized finance teams, and corporate organisations in digitising and simplifying the way money travels between them and their business partners since January 2022.

“We strongly believe that there is a great opportunity to catalyse growth and maximise business opportunities across the continent by removing the bottlenecks that hinder the seamless flow of money between businesses, and we are excited to have raised funding from this exciting group of investors to deliver this much-needed transformation,” Oyekola noted.

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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

Nigerian B2B Payments Startup Duplo Bags $1.3m In Pre-seed Round

February 11, 2022

Duplo, a Lagos-based fintech that aims to reduce inefficiencies in the FMCG industry by automating payment flows for B2B businesses, has raised $1.3 million in a pre-seed fundraising round led by Oui Capital, an early-stage pan-African venture capital firm. MyAsia VC, Y Combinator, Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, and Mono CEO Abdul Hassan were among the local and foreign investors who also took part.

“We are trying to make cash obsolete in Africa where lots of businesses in the distribution space heavily transact in cash for obvious reasons,” said the chief executive officer to TechCrunch in an interview.

“So, we’re focused on distributors, merchants and aggregators to stop the use of cash in this value chain because everyone knows how expensive cash is and how difficult it is to move with issues around theft and fraud.”

Duplo plans to use the majority of the funds to improve its product, technology, and sales, as well as expand into new markets such as tourism, farming, B2B marketplaces, and alcohol and beverage distribution.

Why The Investors Invested

The company has reported considerable traction and had been accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator’s current winter batch. Customers reported cost savings of more than 12% over the three-month pilot period, according to the firm, which launched its pilot three months ago. Duplo has also increased by 60% month over month to service over 20 enterprise companies. Currently, it has processed over $380,000, but according to the CEO, Duplo expects to reach $40 million in annualized TPV by the end of Q2.

“We’re excited to support Yele, Tunde, Emeka and the rest of the team at Duplo as they look to build a scalable B2B payments platform for the African market,” said Peter Oriaifo, principal at Oui Capital, in a statement sent to TechCrunch. “We believe that with the proliferation of commerce in Africa, there’s an emerging need for solutions such as Duplo’s that help abstract away complexities around payments.”

A Look At What The Startup Does

Yele Oyekola, a former product lead at fintech startup Carbon, founded Duplo as a result of his work as an economic policy officer for the United Nations in Africa, where he saw firsthand how individuals and businesses were overly dependant on currency while travelling several nations.

Distributors can use Duplo to build individual virtual accounts for retailers and agents to make real-time payments or bank transfers, and the platform will automatically reconcile their books.

Unlike in the FMCG industry, where making bank transfers can be costly for some retailers and agents, Duplo allows retailers to make transactions to virtual accounts using mobile money agents while reconciliation is completed thereafter.

Every transaction carried out on Duplo’s platform is subject to a 1% fee. Businesses also pay between NGN100 ($0.20) and NGN1,000 ($2.00) to open virtual accounts, depending on their size.

There is a no-code solution for B2B enterprises to maximize trade with their business clients, vendors, and suppliers, in addition to products that enable B2B companies to automate their payment flows. The platform also provides a dashboard to attribute payment flows to a certain customer, store, or region, as well as the ability to issue or pay invoices, offer credit to their business customers, and extend credit to their business customers.

“The way we see our value prop is we help businesses automate, embed and launch payment products. So basically, inflows or outflows, automatic reconciliations for businesses and embedding payments into marketplaces. And then we also have businesses that want to provide BNPL services to smaller businesses,” said Oyekola, who co-founded Duplo with Tunde Akinnuwa in September 2021.

Akinnuwa, the company’s CPO, previously headed JumiaPay’s loan and consumer payments. Duplo’s CTO is Emeka Okwuagwu, who formerly worked at ARCA Payments as an engineering manager and has experience designing fintech products for banks.

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Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer