Termii, a Nigerian communications platform-as-a-service startup, recently raised $3.65 million in new financing, bringing its total funding to approximately $5 million. The investment round was led by Ventures Platform, with participation from FinTech Collective, Launch Africa Ventures, Nama Ventures, Aidi Ventures, Ralicap Ventures, Now Venture Partners, Vastly Valuable Ventures, NOA Capital, Assembly Investors, Probability Ventures, Adamantium Fund, MyAsia VC, Uncovered Fund, and notable angel investors including the Afropreneur Angel Group, Aubrey Hruby, and Eamon Jubbawy of Onifido.

The primary purpose of this investment is to support Termii’s expansion initiatives. The funds will be used to develop and promote both existing and new products in new markets. Termii’s focus has shifted towards Francophone African countries, starting with the Ivory Coast, instead of the previously planned North African markets. The investment will enable Termii to drive growth and expansion, facilitating the company’s mission to provide exceptional communication channels to businesses in Africa.

Why The Investors Invested

Investors were attracted to Termii due to several compelling factors. The founders of Termii, Gbolade Emmanuel, Ayomide Awe, and Atinuke Idowu, identified the significant need for African businesses to have reliable communication channels. They launched Termii in 2017 to address this gap in the market. The startup’s API-based communication infrastructure empowers businesses, especially fintechs, to engage with their customers through various channels, such as SMS, voice messaging, mobile tokens, alerts, and a two-way support system. This innovative solution has garnered significant traction, with over 500 fintechs and more than 1,000 businesses and developers utilizing Termii’s APIs by 2021.

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Furthermore, Termii demonstrated substantial growth and success in its previous funding round. Its annual recurring revenue increased by a remarkable 30x, and the number of message transactions on its platform surged from one million to 400 million. These impressive results showcased Termii’s ability to scale and capitalize on the market demand for its services.

Investors were also attracted to Termii’s responsiveness to customer needs. The startup recognized that its financial services customers required one-time verification systems to secure user transactions and identities. In response, Termii introduced these verification systems across SMS, calls, emails, and WhatsApp, offering customers multiple options and improved delivery rates. This customer-centric approach strengthened Termii’s position as an essential communication infrastructure provider for African businesses.

 A Look At Termii

Founded in 2017 by Gbolade Emmanuel, Ayomide Awe, and Atinuke Idowu, Termii is a communications platform-as-a-service startup operating primarily in the African market. The company’s API-based infrastructure enables businesses, especially fintechs, to enhance their customer engagement by utilizing various communication channels.

Read also : Why Investors Backed Nigeria’s Haul247 In $3M Fundraise to Revolutionize African Logistics and Warehousing

Termii’s flagship product, TermiiGo, is Africa’s first cross-company mobile virtual solution. In addition to regular messaging services, TermiiGo offers features such as calls and one-time password (OTP) generation. The mobile app follows a B2B2C model and provides direct-to-mobile notifications, SMS messaging, and time-based OTPs for social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. TermiiGo also offers international calling for enterprise businesses and eSIM activation using the mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) model across Africa.

Termii’s unique eSIM feature allows African businesses to provide their employees and users with branded SIM cards that offer unlimited voice calls and texts. This feature facilitates remote working and customer support services without the need to switch SIM cards when traveling across cities in Africa and the U.S.

Termii’s expansion plans include launching its services in Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, and the U.S., with a future intention to support additional countries such as those in the U.K. The company aims to provide its comprehensive communication solutions to big tech companies, financial service providers, and small enterprise businesses. Termii’s innovative offerings have garnered significant interest from industry players, highlighting its potential as a communication layer that powers day-to-day business operations.

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

Termii, a Nigerian communications platform-as-a-service startup has announced today that it has raised $1.4m in a seed funding round. The seed investment will be used to expand and introduce further messaging offerings across Africa, a year after Termii graduated from the YC.

“Many…businesses we started engaging said they required tools to effectively communicate and verify customers because they were losing money at those points. For us, we saw it was a bigger problem,” said co-founder Emmanuel Gbolade. 

Here Is What You Need To Know

• Future Africa, an African early-stage VC company, and Kepple Africa Ventures, a Japanese yet Africa-focused VC, co-led the round. Acuity Ventures, Aidi Ventures, Assembly Capital, Kairos Angels, Nama Ventures, RallyCap Ventures, and Remapped Ventures are among the other investors. 

• Angel investors included Ham Serunjogi, the co-founder and CEO of Chipper Cash, Josh Jones, the former co-founder and CTO of Dreamhost, and Tayo Oviosu, the co-founder and CEO of Paga.

• With the new investment, the startup plans to expand in North Africa, with a physical presence in Algeria. According to the startup, expansion to Algeria was informed by the fact that Nigeria accounted for 76 percent of the company’s messaging transactions in the first half of 2021, while Algeria currently accounts for 15%.

• With this new round of funding, Termii also hopes to benefit from the vast experience of some of its new investors, such as Oviosu and Serunjogi, who have also helped local businesses develop.
• In 2017, the company secured investment from Lagos-based VC Microtraction.

Why The Investors Invested

Investment in Termii may have been inspired by the traction the startup has garnered over the considerably short period of time it has been in existence. Already, the startup serves over 500 fintech startups across Africa. It also claims it has over 1,000 businesses and developers who are using Termii’s API. The company further claimed it recorded a 1000 percent rise in messaging transactions and a 400 percent increase in annual revenue. The startup aspires to tap from the $3.6 billion B2C communications market estimated to grow 6% annually. 

“Fragmented and unstable communication channels are one of the biggest challenges for the digitization of businesses in Africa. Emmanuel has proven that with his visionary goals and solid implementation of iterations on the ground, his team is unparalleled to build an innovative solution in this space,” Kepple Africa, Satoshi Shinada, a partner at the firm, said. 

Apart from gaining traction, the startup’s participation in the Y Combinator accelerator programme of 2020 also influenced its latest seed fundraise. Termii has been in existence since 2017. Apart from the investment from Y Combinator and from Microtraction, a local venture capital firm, in 2017, this is its major investment since it was founded. 

It’s also remarkable to note that most of the investors in this round invested as syndicates and are also mostly local investors. They are equally relatively new to the continent’s funding landscape. While Future Africa, co-founded by serial entrepreneur, Iyin Aboyeji, officially launched in 2020, Japanese VC Kepple Africa Ventures made its first investment in 2019. The US-based but Africa-focused firm RallyCap Ventures also started investing in Africa last year. Nama Ventures, all the way from Saudi Arabia, is surprisingly investing in a West African startup. The venture capital firm has mostly been active in the Middle East and North African region. 

One key take-away from this investment is also that local investors are increasingly beginning to play active roles on the continent’s startup funding landscape. According to a recent report, North American investors represented 42% of the total number of investors that participated in VC investments on the continent between 2014 and 2019, followed by European based investors at 23%. African based investors accounted for 20%, followed by Asia-Pacific (8%) and investors based in the Middle East (6%). This, perhaps, shows why Africa lags behind other continents in terms of funding available to its startups ecosystem.

A Look At What Termii Does

Launched in 2017 by Gbolade Emmanuel and Ayomide Awe, co-founder Emmanuel’s experience as a digital marketer motivated him to understand the need for companies to provide outstanding communication platforms, which contributed to the development of Termii. The CEO offered consultancy services to these businesses and used emails to attract clients, but when he learned that this strategy was unsuccessful, he searched for other alternatives.

“That got me to start thinking about multichannel messaging. What it meant was that we needed to find how to allow companies to use WhatsApp, voice, SMS effectively,” he said. “And we had to make the process simple because in the African market, you can’t do complex stuff. You have to be as simple as possible.”

Even though Termii has been in existence since 2017, Emmanuel said the company only found it was fit for market in 2019 after collecting enough data from companies across multiple industries to understand what they really wanted.

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

Termii $1.4m