Nigeria’s banking-as-a-service fintech startup, Anchor, has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding. The Y Combinator-backed startup plans to use this investment to attract the best talents, improve the company’s tech infrastructure, invest in compliance and regulatory infrastructure, and acquire customers.
Investors backing the BaaS fintech include Byld Ventures, Y Combinator, Luno Expeditions, Niche Capital, Mountain Peak Capital, and angel investors such as SeamlessHR, CEO Emmanuel Okeleji.
The startup, which was co-founded last year by Segun Adeyemi, Olamide Sobowale, and Gbekeloluwa Olufotebi, provides APIs, dashboards, and tools that help developers embed and build banking products such as bank accounts, funds transfers, savings products, issuing cards, and offering loans.
Anchor claims to be transacting several millions of dollars while growing 200% month-on-month. The startup makes revenue by charging fees and taking cuts from every billable part of the business: account issuing, money movement, savings, and deposits among others.
What they are saying
- Announcing the company’s fundraising, co-founder and CEO of Anchor, Segun Adeyemi, said: “After months of building and talking to our early customers, we are excited to be coming out of private beta and launching our public beta with a pre-seed round led by Byld Ventures.
- “Also, we got into Y Combinator Summer 2022 batch as the first banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform from Africa. At Anchor, we provide API and tools for businesses to create accounts, transfer funds, offer savings, issue cards, and do more for their customers. This enables them to grow revenues by offering and embedding financial services within their products.”
- Speaking on the company’s solutions, Adeyemi said: “We’re now seeing a new development where businesses want to offer different products and financial services beyond just payments. We strongly believe that the way is not just by latching banking-as-a-service on a payments platform, but there has to be proper banking as a service platform built with the right infrastructure and go-to-market strategy. That’s the problem we decided to solve as a team, basically the full end-to-end infrastructure for startups to be able to build, embed, and launch financial services.”
Adeyemi said the journey to Anchor began in 2015 when he co-founded Amplifypay, a company focused on recurring payments and direct debit. In 2019, one of the largest digital banks in Africa, Carbon acquired Amplifypay. Between 2019 and 2021, he worked at JUMO, the biggest credit infrastructure provider in Africa. During this period, he also advised some of the biggest fintechs and digital banks in Nigeria.
