API Mono has successfully raised $15 million in a series of funding rounds led by Tiger Global
API Mono has successfully raised $15 million in a series of funding rounds led by Tiger Global
An initial round of funding totaling $15 million has been raised by Mono, a fintech startup based in Africa that allows users to connect their bank accounts to financial apps with a simple click on their smartphones.
In addition to Tiger Global, new investors including Target Global (a previous investor in neobank Kuda), General Catalyst, and SBI Investment participated in the funding round.
As a result of its participation in the round, Tiger Global has made a significant investment in Africa for the third time this year, following investments in Flutterwave and FairMoney.
This new round of funding, combined with previous funding rounds from Entree Capital, Lateral Capital, GPIC, Acuity VC, and Ingressive Capital, brings Mono's total fundraising to just over $17 million since its launch last year, bringing the company's total fundraising to just over $17 million since its launch.
Given that more than half of Africa's population is unbanked or has limited access to financial services, open finance players such as Mono are hoping to replicate Plaid's success in the United States market on their own terms.
The business model of the company is based on the belief that providing open API access to a financial ecosystem will increase access to financial information while simultaneously lowering entry costs for the unbanked and underbanked.
Since its founding in 2020 by Abdulhamid Hassan, a former product manager at Paystack, and Prakhar Singh, Mono claims to have processed over 200 million financial data transactions from over 270 companies, developers, and fintech companies.
In the opinion of Abdulhamid Hassan, CEO of Mono, the company's products distinguish it from competitors such as Plaid, Okra, Stitch, and Onepipe, each of which consolidates various financial data into a single API.
Customers can make bank transfer payments to businesses directly through their website or mobile app, without having to use their debit cards, thanks to the DirectPay service, which is available in Nigeria. With this product, the company hopes to achieve the same results as Flutterwave and Paystack, but through the use of bank accounts instead of credit cards.
The company's next competitive offering will be its statement pages, which Hassan claims will be the first of their kind in African history. Without the assistance of a developer, this feature enables businesses to gain access to their clients' bank accounts.
At the same time it was introducing new features tailored to the Nigerian market, Mono announced in May that it was considering expanding into other countries, including Ghana and Kenya. A pilot program with a select number of banks and fintech companies is currently being conducted in Ghana, where it has been successfully launched there.
Kenya continues to be a target market for the company, which also plans to expand into Egypt and South Africa by 2022, in addition to other African countries. As a result of a collaboration with Absa bank, the company is hopeful that its expansion into South Africa will be completed this year.
"Everything we do at Mono is driven first and foremost by our customers' needs and desires. Customers in these countries who are attempting to develop loan or fintech applications have indicated that they will be unable to do so until Mono is available, according to the company "Abdulhamid Hassan, the CEO, explains.
In conclusion, he stated that "people trust us because of how we established our connection and the quality of goods we produced in Nigeria, and they believe that if we visit another country, they will want to start in that country as well."
