OnePipe - Afrikan Heroes

Nigerian Fintech Startup OnePipe Secures $4.8M Debt Financing From TLG Capital

March 17, 2023

TLG Capital, a pan-African alternative investment business, declared that it has teamed up with OnePipe to offer finance services to Nigeria’s unorganised sector. OnePipe, a Nigerian financial infrastructure company, used the company’s technological platforms to enable traditional companies to integrate financial services into their operations. The company offered up to 2.25 billion Naira ($4.8M) in a collateralized loan facility for OnePipe.

The transaction, which represents TLG Capital’s 34th investment, was executed by the TLG Africa Growth Impact Fund (AGIF). Small retailers in Nigeria would receive inventory financing thanks to the investment.

OnePipe is a quickly expanding financial infrastructure business that enables retailers to obtain products from bigger distributors that partner with OnePipe on credit. The business has established a wide network of partners and field agents, including banks and payment service providers. Another impressive group of investors in OnePipe is the Norrsken Foundation, Techstars, Tribe Capital, V&R Associates, Canaan Partners, DFS Laboratories, Ingressive Capital, Acquity, Raba, Saison Capital, The Fund, and Two Culture Cap.

With the help of the investment from TLG Capital, OnePipe will be able to grow its business and work towards its goal of being Nigeria’s top supplier of financial services to small businesses. Almost 85% of employment in Africa, according to the International Labour Organization, comes from microbusinesses. Financial access to this industry is essential for promoting economic growth and eradicating poverty. The model developed by OnePipe is ideally suited to meet this requirement, and TLG Capital’s investment will assist in that endeavour.

Ope Adeoye, the CEO of OnePipe, said: “TLG’s extensive experience structuring debt in Nigeria and their deep network across Africa, particularly in the venture, made them the partner of choice as we look to scale. TLG is our first debt partner and has been a powerful resource in planning our growth and balance sheet strategy. Through this partnership, we’re looking to build the infrastructure to provide credit and payment services to the two-thirds of Nigerian business owners who don’t have access to effective and practical banking services.”

Isaac Marshall, an investment professional at TLG, said: “Despite contributing $220 billion per year in economic activity, micro-enterprises that deal in cash are Nigeria’s most neglected business segment. Fintechs tend to prefer more digitally integrated clients and traditional financiers tend to prefer bigger clients. With a clever product to help these small shops to obtain both credit and better purchasing terms on their goods, OnePipe has pioneered a model that can provide sustainable income growth to tens of millions of micro-enterprises.”

A number of Sustainable Development Goals, including SDG 1 (No Poverty), SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), and SDG 9, are supported by TLG Capital’s investment in OnePipe (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure). OnePipe supports economic growth and sustained income growth by extending financing to unregistered microbusinesses.

TLG Capital and OnePipe are thrilled to work together on this project and anticipate doing so in order to advance financial inclusion and economic development in Nigeria.

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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

OnePipe Partners Releaf for Financial Inclusion and Better Productivity for Nigerian Farmers

May 31, 2021

Farmers in Nigeria’s South-South region have received a boost to improve productivity and access finance through a new partnership between Releaf and OnePipe. This development is fundamental against the backdrop of the fact that it has provided well over 2,000 oil palm farmers in Cross River and Akwa Ibom states now have access to digitized financial services, thanks to a partnership between Releaf , a raw material procurement & logistics platform that is making it easy for crops to move from farm to factory, and OnePipe, a digital gateway enabling financial services.

OnePipe’s Founder and Chief Plumber, Ope Adeoye

The need to help farmers access finance stems from the fact that over 65 percent of Nigerians are outside the financial services envelope, with millions unbanked or under-banked. The combination of COVID-19 disruptions and the widening digital divide in the rural and underserved areas has threatened the attainment of financial inclusion targets in Nigeria. This partnership between Releaf and OnePipe is thus a welcome initiative to the National Financial Inclusion Strategy and provides opportunities for thousands of rural farmers across Nigeria’s South-South region.

Speaking on the collaboration, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer for Releaf, Uzoma Ayogu, said; “Since inception, Releaf has empowered over 1,000 farmers to supply over 10 million kilograms of quality crops to various food factories. While disbursements to our farmers have been largely cash-based, we now have access to digitized fund disbursement via embedded, customised accounts, provisioned by OnePipe, to drive financial inclusion of previously financially excluded farmers in the digital economy. As a result, we can provide increased funding to farmers in a more seamless, scalable, and safe manner. We are also exploring other products like insurance and other services leveraging OnePipe’s infrastructure and strategic partnerships with an array of Financial Institutions.

The embedded customised accounts for the farmers are provisioned leveraging OnePipe’s partner bank APIs. They are opened and operated via USSD and *PWA (Progressive Web App) channels and branded as Releaf Wallet for ease of adoption by the farmers. As full-utility accounts, farmers can receive inflow from any bank/channel and can transfer funds to any Nigerian bank account; they can also access readily available services such as airtime top-up (self and third party), savings/investments and various loan options. The loan options are configured such that consistent usage of the Releaf wallet by the farmers results in a correspondingly increasing credit line.

OnePipe’s Founder and Chief Plumber, Ope Adeoye described the partnership with Releaf as “an exciting opportunity to co-create value with Releaf. Releaf is reviving agricultural infrastructure and crafting a sustainable path to prosperity for farmers who previously did not have commensurate return for their labour”. According to him, “working with Releaf was inevitable as the company’s vision to transform Africa’s agricultural future by making decentralized food processing scaleable coincides with OnePipe’s social mandate to drive financial inclusion through technology for all – including the 700M+ smallholder farmers on the continent.”

OnePipe’s platform provides a single gateway that aggregates financial services from industry leaders and combines them in unique ways to create new brand propositions that help organisations reduce time to market by embedding financial services within their products. OnePipe is at the vanguard of the embedded finance movement in Sub-Saharan Africa and has assisted companies like Releaf to provide seamless digital financial services to their partners. In addition to the ongoing partnership with Releaf, OnePipe is also working with key players in the Retail, FMCG and Asset Management space to facilitate embedded finance within their existing offerings.

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 Fintech Startup OnePipe Secures $950k In Pre-seed Round

December 18, 2020

OnePipe, a Nigerian fintech startup has secured a US$950,000 pre-seed funding round to implement its “banking as a service” solution. With the funding, the startup plans to expand its user base.

“All of us on the OnePipe team are firm believers in the open banking movement and what we believe it can do for financial services adoption in the world. While we are actively particpating with the Open Banking Nigeria group to bring awareness and drive policy around it, we have created a gateway that pools APIs from multiple sources together under a unified specification that can very easily be refined to fit the final standards once the policies become a thing,” the startup noted in a statement.

Here Is What You Need To Know

The investment came from Techstars, Atlantica Ventures, Future Perfect Ventures, Raba Capital, P1 Ventures, Ingressive Capital, Sherpa.Africa, Zedcrest Capital, DFS Lab and a host of angels including, Idris Ayo Bello, Jim Chu, Haresh Aswani, Vishal Agarwal, Folabi Esan, Chris Adelsbach (who also backed Kuda early on) and several more.
With the funding, the startup will now focus on further developing its solution, as well as grow its fintech partnerships to increase customer deposits and transactions in a low-risk way.

Why The Investors Invested

For OnePipe being part of Techstars NYC 2020 Summer programme was a deal breaker. Apart from Y Combinator, Techstars accelerators are highly rated and strongly favour participating startups investment-wise.

“Our fundraise got a big shot in the arm after coming out of the programme. We were able to close out our pre-seed faster, especially now that we have clarity on market direction and traction during the programme,” founder Ope Adeoye said, of the startup’s participation in the summer 2020 edition of Techstars NYC accelerator.

Also strengthening its pitch to investors is the fact that even though the startup is playing in a relatively saturated ecosystem — fintech — it is carving out a niche for itself, by going the API way. In April 2020, Okra, a similar API fintech platform, led by Fara Ashiru Jituboh and David Peterside, became the first African API startup to raise $1 million from heavy weight VC TLcom Capital, which is also a previous investor in Nigerian edtech startup uLesson and Kenyan agritech startup Twiga Foods. This was later followed by investment of $500k in another Nigerian API startup Mono by Lateral Capital ( Investors in Appzone, Asoko Insights), Ventures Platform (early backer of Paystack, Kudi etc) and Golden Palm ( Investors in Andela, Flutterwave), Rally cap, Idriss bello (Early investor in Flutterwave and Andela), Olumide Soyombo, and other amazing strategic investors.

A Look At What The Startup Does

Launched in August 2019 by Ope Adeoye and a team of about six, the OnePipe platform integrates the services of banks, incumbents and other fintechs into one unified bundle, then works with its clients to make available APIs from that gateway to businesses. With the partnerships that OnePipe has put in place, it easier to obtain access to a range of APIs with unique use cases that can be combined to help optimise costs and improve some business processes.

Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other.

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