Five months after closing $2 million in seed investment, Mono, a robust open banking platform for Africa has raised a $15 million Series A round to power the digital economy in Africa.
The round was led by Tiger Global with participation from Target Global, General catalyst, and SBI Investments. Existing investors, Entrée, Acuity, Ingressive, Lateral Capital, and GPIC also participated in this round.
This raise brings Mono’s total outside funding to $17.6 million.
What Mono does
Launched in 2020 by Abdulhamid Hassan and Prakhar Singh, mono helps digital businesses in Africa access their customers’ financial accounts for data and payments.
More than half of the population is either unbanked or has limited access to financial services. Mono, an open finance player in Africa, thrives on the idea that gaining access to a financial ecosystem via open APIs will improve financial information access and lower entry costs for the unbanked.
Open banking has been about giving third parties access to retail banking data. Mono’s goal is to give consumers the ability to grant access to all of their digital accounts across banking, offline channels, traditional entities, etc.
Mono has grown to serve 200+ valued customers and partners since its launch, including Flutterwave, Renmoney, Aella, Credpal, Lendsqr, Float, Payhippo, and many others.
The company has delivered over 200 million units of financial data to its partners to date.
In the last two months, the company has connected over 150,000 bank accounts, which is up 45 percent year on year. Mono has doubled its headcount from last year, with around 30 employees today, according to Techcrunch.
What the new funding is for
Mono will use the funds raised to expand their products to new countries, scale their product development efforts to meet rapidly increasing market demand and support their exponential growth, double existing connection coverage, reach over 50 integrations, and launch their bank-to-bank payment initiation offering in Nigeria by the end of the year.
This starts with the upcoming launch of Mono DirectPay, a product that helps Nigerian businesses to collect bank transfer payments from customers within their web or mobile app without using their debit cards.
I am yasir Muhammad Jega