Nigeria’s B2B payments startup, Duplo, has raised $4.3 million in seed funding. This is coming just seven months after it announced its $1.3 million pre-seed investment, bringing its total funds raised to $5.6 million.
The company said it would be leveraging the fund to launch new products and expand into new business areas in Nigeria. Participant investors in the seed round include Liquid2 Ventures, Soma Capital, Tribe Capital, Commerce Ventures, Basecamp Fund, Y Combinator, and existing investor Oui Capital.
Launched in September 2021 by Yele Oyekola and Tunde Akinnuwa, Duplo’s end-to-end solution automates the back-office processes of generating and processing invoices, receiving and approving bills, collecting and disbursing funds, and completing account reconciliation for finance teams. Duplo works seamlessly with all major accounting and ERP platforms such as Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, QuickBooks and Sage, and payments processed through Duplo are automatically synced with these platforms in real-time.
What they are saying
Commenting on the fundraising, CEO and co-founder of Duplo, Yele Oyekola, said: “We have seen a lot of innovation in consumer payments in Africa in recent years but business-to-business payments have largely stayed the same. We strongly believe that there is a great opportunity to catalyse growth and maximise business opportunities across the continent by removing the bottlenecks that hinder the seamless flow of money between businesses and we are excited to have raised funding from this exciting group of investors to deliver this much-needed transformation.”
“We’re also trying to expand into new verticals. Initially, we started with the FMCG industry; now we’ve seen interest in the construction industry, telecoms, and these major mid-sized enterprise businesses, and set up the foundation to scale across the continent hopefully in the next nine to 12 months,” he added.
Also commenting, Principal at Oui Capital, Peter Oriaifo, said: “The Duplo team has built an incredible suite of products that improve how businesses make and receive payments from each other, and the growth that the company has experienced since our initial pre-seed investment in 2021 has been nothing short of impressive. It is for this reason that we are excited to back Duplo once more.”
Since going live in January 2022, Duplo has seen great traction with FMCG distributors and finance teams of midsize and enterprise businesses, helping them to digitise and simplify the way money moves between them and their business partners.
