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Nigerian credit management fintech startup, Bfree, has raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding to expand its operations to 16 new emerging markets, including Ghana, India and Brazil.
Bfree is a Nigerian startup co-founded by Chukwudi Enyi, Moses Nmor, and Julian Flosbachin in August 2020 to curb credit default risk in the financial services industry.
The company deploys strategic solutions to increase the repayment rate on loans through the use of tech tools and data from credit institutions to predict customer risk profiles and recommend the best credit collection method.
It currently handles about 800,000 customers and has followed up with 1.1 million defaulters to date.
According to information gathered by Billionaires.Africa, the funding round brings the total capital raised by the Nigerian startup to $2.5 million, having secured $800,000 in a seed round last year.
The $1.7-million capital raise was led by 4Di Capital, an independent venture capital fund manager based in South Africa. Other participants included Octerra Capital, VestedWorld, Voltron Capital and Logos Ventures.
The startup explained that the proceeds will be deployed to expand its operations beyond its current market in Nigeria and Kenya to about 16 new emerging markets.
The strategic move is linked to its expansion plans, as it will better position the startup to leverage opportunities in underserved markets.
Commenting on the development, Flosbach, CEO and co-founder, said: “We are going into markets with large populations, credit deepening and an underdeveloped regulatory environment, where a behavioral collection approach is likely to work.”
We saw that there was like a little bit of a breach in the value proposition of lenders — they are good at giving out loans, but the after sales services of the credit market did not work as collections processes were inefficient and not user friendly,” he added.
