By Rosemary Iwuala
Nomba, a leading payment service provider for African businesses, has raised a $30 million Pre-Series B funding round to support the delivery of bespoke payment solutions for African businesses.
The oversubscribed equity funding round was led by San Francisco-based Base10 Partners (investors in Nubank, Plaid and Brex), with participation from Helios Digital Ventures, Shopify, Partech and Khosla Ventures.
The company noted that despite the growth in digital payments across Africa, most businesses still only have access to generic point-of-sale machines to support the collection of payments.
As such, these machines, it said, also typically work in isolation from the rest of the business operations, leading to a variety of inefficiencies in their business processes.
What to do with the Fund
With this new funding, Nomba promises to deliver payment solutions that have been designed for the specific services that businesses provide, enabling them to plug gaps in their payment processes, operate more efficiently and deliver excellent customer experiences.
It said, for instance, restaurants will be able to access menus, manage inventory, receive payments and perform other business functions all from the same hardware.
For transport and logistics companies, Nomba’ solutions will enable them to directly connect their transactions to payments, creating a more seamless experience that increases sales and profitability.
Starting in Nigeria, Nomba said it will also deliver a range of business tools, including invoicing and order management solutions to improve efficiency and reduce cost of operations for businesses across the continent.
“This new capital will enable the company to deliver more solutions for businesses in Nigeria, across Africa and in other markets, as the opportunities may emerge,” it said in statement on Tuesday.
Track record
Since launching in 2016 as “Kudi.ai”, a chatbot integration that responds to financial requests on social apps, Nomba has evolved over the years into a profitable, omnichannel payment service provider.
The company supports more than 300,000 businesses with a wide range of payment solutions, as well as management and banking tools that enable better business processes and support business owners to be better at doing business.
The company processes $1 billion in monthly transactions, which represents a market leading gross transaction value (GTV) for a payment service provider in Africa.
Before this funding round, Nomba had only previously raised $5 million in funding, leveraging those funds to successfully grow the business and efficiently deliver solutions that have positively impacted hundreds of thousands of businesses across Nigeria.
Remarks
According to Yinka Adewale, CEO and co-founder of Nomba, “We see payment as a business model, not just a product and we want to make it easier for businesses to take advantage of all that is possible in their payment processes to support their continued growth and success.
“We have a long list of products we have been working on and the funds we have raised as well as the investors that have backed us gives us a lot of confidence about what can be achieved with more effective payment solutions in the hands of business owners,” Adewale said.
Luci Fonseca, Partner at Base10 said, “Nomba’s track record of innovation and capital efficiency makes it one of the most exciting startups in Africa. We are thrilled to be supporting them to deliver their game changing solutions to power growth and continued success for businesses in Nigeria and beyond.”
