Pngme, a Fintech startup raised $15 million in Series A funding as the company sets out to grow its financial data infrastructure and machine learning-as-a-service platform for financial institutions and fintechs across sub-Saharan Africa.
The round was led by Octopus Ventures, a $1.7bn Venture Capital fund based in London and comes less than a year after the $3 million Seed round.
Pngme’s mission has been to enable access to finance for everyone by providing mission-critical data infrastructure and machine learning models for the next generation of financial services.
The startup will use the Series A raise to expand its executive team with the hiring of Lorraine Kageni Maina as Chief Strategy Officer and Nick Masson as Chief Technology Officer.
Lorraine brings corporate experience in sub-Saharan Africa from Banking, FMCG, and Technology.
Nick has led large enterprise-scale engineering teams at WeWork and joins with an ambitious vision to scale Pngme’s cutting-edge technology.
Alongside key executive hires, Pngme is expanding its data science, engineering, product, and sales teams globally to meet the demand for integrations across large enterprise banks, credit bureaus, MFBs, fintechs, and neo banks.
Brendan Playford, CEO, Pngme said, “With the demand, we are seeing in our core markets and from financial institutions globally, it is clear we are solving a major pain point by building financial data infrastructure and machine learning-as-a-service.
“With this fresh injection of capital, we are not only scaling up our data processing and machine learning capabilities but also building a robust team that can deliver on our mission of financial inclusion.”
Octopus Ventures invests in technology leaders across health, fintech, consumer and B2B software with a focus on companies committed to pioneering the future of efficient transactions and inclusive technology.
Pngme is thrilled to be part of the firm’s fintech portfolio with cazoo, sprout.ai, semafone and digital shadows among others, and are proud to join WeFarm as the firm’s second Africa-based investment.
Octopus Ventures are joined by Lateral Capital, Unshackled Ventures, Raptor Group, EchoVC, Future Africa, Aruwa Capital Management Two Small Fish Ventures, the 51 and a talented group of individual angel investors including RallyCap’s Hayden Simmons, Plaid’s Dan Khan, former COO of RBC Capital Markets Richard Talbot, Creative Destruction Lab mentors, and Intersect VC’s Kyle Ellicott among others.
Pngme’s infrastructure has processed billions of data points from hundreds of financial institutions across sub-Saharan Africa and plans to double down on its Insights Library and expand its third-party data connections to other markets over the next year.
