The Nigerian fintech startup Mono has closed a $2-million deal in a seed funding round to power the Internet economy in Africa.
Nigerian Abdul Hassan and Indian Prakhar Singh co-founded the company in 2020. Mono is an application programming interface (API) that streamlines financial data in a single programming interface for companies and third-party developers.
Since its inception, the startup has connected more than 100,000 financial accounts for its partners and analyzed over 66 million financial transactions.
TechCrunch reported that the latest investment came less than a year after it raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding in September 2020, two months after receiving $125,000 from Ycombinator. With this latest round of financing, Mono is estimated to have received a total of $2.625 million in investments.
According to TechCrunch, Mono will use the funding to reinforce its financial and identity data offerings and launch new products for diverse business verticals. It also plans pan-African expansion, with Ghana and Kenya receiving priority focus.
“Our focus isn’t only on open banking but data,” Hassan said. “We’re thinking of how we can power the internet economy with data that isn’t necessarily financial data. For instance, think about open data for telcos. Imagine where you can move your data from one telco to another instead of getting a new SIM card and making a fresh registration. That’s where I see the market going, at least for us at Mono.”
Venture capitalists involved in the round included Entrée Capital, Kuda Co-Founder and CEO Babs Ogundeyi, TCVP Partner Gbenga Oyebode, Verod Capital Co-Founder and Partner Eric Idiahi and VC Lateral Capital.
Commenting, Avil Eyal said: “We are very excited to be working with Abdul, Prakhar and the entire Mono team as they continue to build out the rails for African banking to enable the delivery of financial services to hundreds of millions of people across the African continent.”
