Nigerian-based FinTech Wallets Africa, which gives consumers an app to manage their money, has closed a new investment round as it looks to grow its presence in Africa.
The capital was supplied by Mozilla Corporation, 9Yards Capital, Samurai Incubate and Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel.
Wallets Africa has the goal of becoming a digital bank and is preparing itself for competition. The funds from the new round will help the startup to scale.
The company founder and CEO John Oke said, “We are providing corporate banking for businesses. This investment, which is basically an impact investment, will be used to help small businesses scale. We are becoming the first bank account for businesses as they can sign up on our portal and get an account in three minutes,” he said. “Wallets Africa will also be helping these businesses and developers issue wallets the way most of them issue cards these days.”
The company has 43,000 users and handles over $6.7m in transactions each month. Its physical prepaid Naira cards will be released this week, enabling consumers to withdraw cash from ATMs and pay at POS terminals.
Wallets Africa was founded in 2018, with the idea coming to Oke whilst he was a software engineer for gift voucher company SureGifts. When integrating the company’s core backend with the mobile money service M-Pesa, Oke realised there was an opportunity for seamless payments.
This eventually led him to building a platform for digital wallets and online transactions.
The FinTech mobile app offers an easy way for users send money locally and internationally, and spend money online.
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