Pezesha, a Pan-African embedded finance firm, has raised a pre-series A investment of $11m.
The round was a mix of $6m in equity and $5m in debt and was led by Women’s World Banking Capital Partners.
Pezesha claims it offers a B2B digital lending infrastructure that is focused on providing affordable working capital to financially excluded SMEs in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Headquartered in Kenya, the company said it has been focusing on solving hard infrastructure problems that exclude MSMEs in the ‘missing middle’. The company has become a leader in embedded finance in Africa, and offers productive credit to tech-enabled platforms such as Twiga Foods, Jumia and Marketforce amongst others.
Partners of Pezesha are able to integrate with its APIs and offer credit among other financial services to their merchant network at the point of sale. The firm’s credit scoring APIs act as an engine of a process where MSMEs receive real-time loan offers to purchase stock and pay later.
In addition, the business offers financial literacy courses and debt counselling to MSMEs who do not qualify for loans in order to improve their credit scoring.
Pezesha said it will use the funding to significantly scale operations in its core markets and grow its new markets within Sub Saharan Africa, as well as expanding its digital lending infrastructure to the West African market.
Spectral, a company specialising in the decentralised finance space, recently raised $23m from a funding round.
The round was led by General Catalyse and SocialCapital and also saw participation from Samsung Next, Gradient Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Section 32, Circle, Jump Crypto and Shrug Capital amongst others.
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