17.August.2021 – Africa-based and San-Francisco-based Pngme, a fintech startup, announced that it raised USD 15 Million in a Series A funding round. This round was led by Octopus Ventures.
The participants in this round were Lateral Capital, Raptor Group, EchoVC, Two Small Fish Ventures, Future Africa, and Unshackled Ventures. Pngme also saw the participation of angel investors like RB Capital, Kyle Ellicott (Investors VC), Hayden Simmons (RallyCap) Dan Kahn (Plaid), and Richard Talbot (RBC Capital).
Last year in 2020, it secured USD 3 Million in a seed funding round. The startup has started describing itself as a machine learning service platform.
The startup will utilize this capital raised by investing in the executive workforce to gain more customers.
On the investment done by Octopus Ventures, Tosin Agbabiaka said, “The elegance of the technology solution, combined with an exceptional team and strong market traction with large institutions underlines our belief that Pngme will power the next generation of financial services in Africa, helping to give millions of more people access to banking and lending.”
Pngme’s platform serves financial institutions and fintechs in sub-Saharan Africa. It plans to stealthily head out of Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. Currently, it has three main products in these markets.
Pngme has added a new customer management platform with its API and mobile SDK. It claims that these products will boost its customers’ adoption and use of tailored user experience and products.
Pngme’s platform caters to fintechs and other financial institutions across sub-Saharan Africa. When the founders, Brendan Playford and Cate Rung, last spoke with TechCrunch, Pngme was heading out of stealth mode in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.
“It’s a highly data-driven user experience. And every fintech or bank wants to provide that same data-driven user experience. From instant loans or savings, or overdrafts, or whatever it might be, it’s all just like a user experience around a product,” Playford said, referring to both Chinese super-app juggernauts. “If you get to the core of all of the business problems for financial institutions, they’re looking at doing two things. One is they’re looking at lowering their customer acquisition costs. And then they’re looking at increasing the lifetime value of their customers.”
Pngme was initiated by Brendan Playford and Cate Rung in 2018. It unifies the financial data of 3.3 billion people. It allows fintechs and financial institutions to accumulate and aggregate financial data at scale.
“The pain point we solve is the cost of building the infrastructure is very high. And the data science, the data engineering talent, just globally is really hard to find. So building a data infrastructure as a service works really well because it’s a subscription to get those services which you’d normally need a five- or six-person team to build.”
After this investment Pngme has gathered a total of USD 18.5 Million in total, making it the most funded startup in the fintech sector in the continent.
“What we do is that we’ve kind of really differentiated ourselves to be not just collecting the data that we can see but also, we can connect to Mono data, Okra data, and we can connect with banks’ data. We essentially merge all that data and then put machine learning models on top for the clients. That can be predictive credit models, segmentation models and really positioning ourselves as a data processing infrastructure for banks and fintechs.”
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