After expanding to New York, Nigerian SME lender Lidya has now opened offices in Warsaw and in Prague.
Lidya also lets micro-businesses and SMEs to get credit lines for unpaid invoices to boost working capital, with loans being deployed within 48 hours. The company has supplied more than 1,500 buisness loans to support MSMEs working in the farming, hospitality, logistics, real estate, technology and real estate industries.
Lidya was founded by Tunde Kehinde, the co-founder of Jumia, the e-commerce platform that has is the biggest received of FinTech investment in Africa to date, according to FinTech Global’s data.
The unicorn was launched in 2012 and has raised $554.8m between 2014 and the first six months of 2019. To put that in perspective, $849.8m was invested in African FinTech businesses in total during that period, according to FinTech Global’s own research.
Lidya’s expansion into Europe is part of Lidya’s goal of creating 100 million jobs around the world, according to Forbes.
The news comes of the back of the startup’s $6.9m Series A funding round in May 2018. The money was used to expand its loan capacity, scale across Nigeria as well as enter new markets in Africa.
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