Allawee joins the growing list of fintech players in Africa; with their infrastructure play, they aim to become enablers not competitors. The developer-friendly platform which was launched in December 2021, already has over 100,000 API calls and a growing list of customers including Carbon, Renmoney, LipaLater, Autochek, FintechFarm, Shara & many others.
Their goal is to become a global credit infrastructure layer by leveraging current standards like FICO, and building new standards long term that create economic growth for Africa and the world.
The founding team Oreofe Olurin & Ikenna Enenwali are experienced entrepreneurs in the Nigerian credit and banking space. Founding investors include Charles Oppenheimer (Twilio) who also has been investing in credit building startups in Africa since 2012.
Enenwali and Olurin started their first startup Kola Credit – a “CreditKarma for Nigeria” when they met 3 years ago in Lagos. This meant that they had to go through the pain of integrating with the credit bureaus.
Afterwards, they started Allawee in January 2021 as a credit building mobile app, lending money via a credit wallet system. In building that application, they came across a problem: accessing credit risk data in Nigeria in a consistent way was difficult and costly. It became obvious through customer discovery, that there was a huge demand for an API that other fintechs could easily plug into to collect credit insights in a cost-and-developer friendly manner.
This discovery gave birth to the first open credit API in Africa. This vastly simplifies the process of accessing multiple credit bureaus for credit checks and reporting. With one API call, customers get back merged insights across all 3 credit bureaus.
“During our product development phase we figured out how hard making sense of credit data is, and how critical it is for business to have access to clean, structured and consistent data. In December we launched our Credit Data as a service API and experienced massive growth with over 100 businesses signing up. Our API growth has been encouraging as we have grown 153% WoW since launch.” Enenwali added.
They also provide Radar, a dashboard interface to view and interact with these requests, which makes the product instantly accessible for smaller customers prior to integrating the API directly into their applications.
“Radar is the easiest way to view credit risk. The easy-to-use underwriting platform displays rich insights for businesses to make faster and better credit decisions. No coding required”. Olurin added.
Allawee has an impeccable lineup of investors for its pre-seed round, led by Abe Choi & Olumide Soyombo’s Voltron Capital, U.S. based pan-African VC firm. Other investors who took part in this round include both funds and angels like Ngozi Dozie, Cofounder of Carbon.
The funds also include ODX (a fund by On Deck Co-CEO, Erik Torenburg and Founding Partner, Shawn Xu). ODX is a venture capital accelerator backed by top investors and operators from around the globe. Allawee joined as one of the 120 companies, with an acceptance rate less than 1.5%, in the program’s inaugural cohort.
RallyCap and PiggyVest also participated in the round. With the backing of such growth-focused investors, Allawee aims to use the funding to polarize growth in the credit space in Africa.
Now a business can simply sign up, receive an API key, and with one API request hit all three credit bureaus within seconds.
Visit https://allawee.com to learn more.
