Duplo secures $1.3 million to create payment infrastructure for B2B business

Nigerian fintech, Duplo has raised $1.3 million pre-seed fund to digitise payment flows for Business-2-Business (B2B) companies.

The round was led by early-stage pan-African VC firm Oui Capital with local and international investors including: MyAsia VC, Y Combinator, Flutterwave CEO, Olugbenga “GB” Agboola and Mono CEO, Abdul Hassan.

Founded by Yele Oyekola and Tunde Akinnuwa in September 2021, Duplo enables businesses across Africa to simplify their payment flows. Distributors can create unique virtual accounts for retailers and agents to make real-time payments or bank transfers, while the platform helps to reconcile their books automatically.

"We are trying to make cash obsolete in Africa where lots of businesses in the distribution space heavily transact in cash for obvious reasons. We are focused on distributors, merchants and aggregators to stop the use of cash in this value chain because everyone knows how expensive cash is and how difficult it is to move with issues around theft and fraud", Yele Oyekola, CEO at Duplo said.

Duplo charges a 1% fee for every transaction performed on its platform. And depending on their size, businesses also pay between ₦100 (~$0.20) to ₦1,000 (~$2.00) to create virtual accounts.

Besides providing tools that enable B2B companies to digitize their payment flows, there’s a no-code tool for them to optimize trade with their business customers, vendors and suppliers.

Related: How the  Business-2-Business (B2B) model works

Yele added that Duplo's "value proposition is we help businesses automate, embed and launch payment products. Basically, inflows or outflows, automatic reconciliations for businesses and embedding payments into marketplaces. And then we also have businesses that want to provide BNPL services to smaller businesses."

With Duplo, distributors can create unique virtual accounts for retailers and agents to make real-time payments or bank transfers, while the platform helps to reconcile their books automatically.

According to Peter Oriaifo, principal at Oui Capital said, "We’re excited to support Yele, Tunde, Emeka and the rest of the team at Duplo as they look to build a scalable B2B payments platform for the African market. We believe that with the proliferation of commerce in Africa, there’s an emerging need for solutions such as Duplo’s that help abstract away complexities around payments."

The fintech startup is among the 13 African companies participating in the Y Combinator Winter 2022 batch.