Indicina - Afrikan Heroes

Nigeria’s Indicina Raises $3M Seed Round For African Expansion

June 7, 2022

Indicina, a credit agency company, has raised $3 million to fund its African expansion plans. The company, which is already operating in Nigeria and Kenya, says it would also utilize the funds to develop new products for consumer credit recommendations and to strengthen its infrastructure.

Target Global, a pan-European venture capital firm based in Berlin, led the round, adding to its long history of investments in Nigerian businesses like as Kuda, Kippa, and Edukoya. Ricardo Schäefer, a partner of the business, will join Indicina’s board of directors. Greycroft and RV Ventures also participated in this round.

The investors were drawn to Indicina because of its novel approach to addressing Africa’s financial crisis. The company uses data to solve the loan eligibility issue that was previously determined by insufficient creditworthiness ratings.

Yvonne Johnson, Indicina’s co-founder and CEO, stated that the platform now has over 120 customers, including banks, non-bank lenders, and fintech. Polaris Bank, LipaLater, VFD, Zilla, and CreditDirect are a few examples.

“We have been working with the lenders; now we want to involve consumers. So, they see what the lender would see if they are going to apply for a loan,” Johnson said, while stressing the importance of using the funding to get to the next iteration of the company’s machine learning and data play,

She went on to say that the financing would enable Indiana to expand its product development in that area by hiring more data scientists and machine learning engineers.

“We’ve never had any balance sheet. It’s never been about offering credit for us. We want to focus on the infrastructure layer and provide good infrastructure for people to feel more comfortable. We want lenders to be better informed about the decisions around credit so they can go to market faster with their digital products. So, we’ve never had a business model that included our balance sheet, which we’ve always worked with the lenders,” she said.

Indicina credit Indicina credit

Here’s A List Of Over 600 New Startup Investors In Africa

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

Indicina, Nigerian Startup Raises Undisclosed Amount for Product Development

December 11, 2020

One of Nigeria’s leading startups Indicina, which focuses on the development of a data-driven lending platform that digitises the credit value chain, has raised an undisclosed six-figure US dollar funding round as it looks to further build out its product. Indicina which was founded two years ago in 2018 sets out to help both bank and non-bank lenders apply a data-driven approach to credit underwriting at scale, providing new insights into consumers and de-risking unsecured loans.

Indicina Chief executive officer (CEO) Yvonne Johnson

The company equally offers a cloud-based software to digitise the lending business, with its flagship product Originate taking an analytics-driven approach to lending. It empowers clients to unpack the credit value chain and digitise each step, including identity verification, credit decisioning, and disbursements and collections.

It could be recalled that the company had in 2019 raised US$100,000 in capital and recently closed a new, larger six-figure round from investors including Acuity, Kepple, Itanna and Future Africa. Chief executive officer (CEO) Yvonne Johnson told Disrupt Africa the funding would be used mainly for product development, in areas such as engineering and artificial intelligence (AI), as the startup looks to build on already-impressive uptake. The CEO said that Indicina has processed over US$30 million in loan applications covering over 22,000 customers,” adding that “our client base includes lenders as well as SaaS verticals embedding finance within their platforms.”

With Africa’s poor credit infrastructure, only 11 per cent of the continent’s population have their credit information recorded by private credit bureaus and only 17 percent of African banking customers have consumer loans. Johnson said this was a “massive consumer credit opportunity” that required technology and credit risk innovation that most lenders currently do not have. Indicina provides both, with Johnson saying its competitive advantage over other players in the space was its deep understanding of the financial services industry across key emerging markets. Johnson herself previously led the Strategy team at First Bank of Nigeria.

“We understand the business of credit and how technology – specifically end to-end credit journeys – can drive profitability of consumer loan portfolios. Innovation has placed demands on traditional lending business models,” she said.

“How do you expand consumer credit to under-and-unbanked populations in a prudent manner while shortening time-to-decision? Taking a cue from fintechs, leading banks have embraced the digital lending revolution, bringing “time to yes” down to five minutes, and time to cash to less than 24 hours.”

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry

Nigerian Digital Lending Startup Indicina Secures $150k From Itanna

September 30, 2020

Indicina Technologies, a Lagos-based digital lending platform has secured $150k from Itanna, the venture capital arm of Honeywell Group. The new financing will accelerate the startup’s continued expansion within Nigeria, as well as support further development of their proprietary technology platform and their pursuit of expansion opportunities in other African markets.

Co-founder Yemi Ajao — Co-founder Yvonne Johnson

Why The Investor Invested

A core component of the Honeywell Group’s overall innovation strategy, Itanna is an investment fund that provides expertise, market connections, institutional knowledge, and capital required to enable innovative teams to build trailblazing enterprises. Itanna operates from the Enterprise Factory located in Lagos, Nigeria, working with start-ups at every stage of maturity to provide the tools, resources, and expertise they need to succeed. The initiative is broad-based and includes a community and an accelerator programme, as well as a growth fund.

“The credit lending industry needs innovative, industry-leading tools to tackle the unique challenges presented to lenders in developing countries,” said Tomi Otudeko, Director of Itanna. “What Indicina and the team have developed over the last two years is hugely impressive, and we’re excited to be working together to create a global market leader. Indicina is a great example of the type of founder-led, capital-efficient business that we like to invest in.”

A Look At What Indicina Does

Co-founded in 2018 by Yvonne Johnson and Yemi Ajao, Indicina is an Africa-focused digital lending platform that provides analytics-driven credit decision for lenders. It utilises a proprietary machine learning decision engine to quickly identify and reject potentially bad loans during the application and underwriting process. Therefore, enabling lenders to make real-time lending decisions with improved risk outcomes.

Indicina’s flagship product, Originate, is an innovative full-stack lending-as-a-service platform utilising machine learning to drive a digitally led consumer finance strategy.

With rapid product development as a key focus, Indicina will continue to develop Originate to advance digitisation of the credit value chain across all customer segments and allowing lenders, bank and non-bank, to underwrite risk intelligently, helping to improve default rates within the industry. The Originate platform can manage the entire process from customer acquisition, operations and underwriting, portfolio management, to loss management. The rising demand for digital tools across the continent, presents an opportunity for Indicina to explore the deployment of Originate in other African markets.

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