Nigerian fintech, Mono, raises $500k in pre-seed funding

Barely two months after its launch, Mono has raised $500,000 in venture funding.

According to Techpoint, the pre-seed funding round included VCs like Lateral Capital, Ventures Platform, Golden Palm Investments, and Rally Capital. Angel investors including Idris Bello and Olumide Soyombo, also got in on the action.

News of the investment was broken on Friday 18, September in a tweet by Kyane Kassiri, a Venture Associate at Lateral Capital. The partnership which was described as the beginning of a love story will see Lateral Capital join as the first institutional investor in Mono.

Lateral Capital is a VC fund that invests in early and growth stage African startups. The fund backs businesses that solve pain points across industries like energy, financial services, healthcare and education. Some of its portfolio companies include Carry1st  - a Nigerian gaming start-up, Lynk -  a Kenyan recruitment startup, and Asoko Insight, a corporate information platform.

What does Mono do?

The recent investment lends credence to the excitement around Mono's fintech solution for organizations looking to access their customers' financial accounts. The new fintech startup is led by Abdulhamid Hassan and Prakar Singh. Before his time as CEO of Mono, Abdul Hassan worked as a product manager at Nigerian payment company, Paystack. He also had a brief stint as CEO of the now-defunct Oyapay  between 2017 and 2019.

Mono promises a faster and easier way for organizations to access their customers' financial accounts. Their innovative API allows organizations to generate bank statements, verify account details, initiate payments, perform credit checks and much more.

Early demonstrations of the Mono platform also show a more interactive user interface than is currently obtainable from similar platforms. Most companies make use of screen scraping to fetch data from their customers' banks and that results in a slow, clunky process. With Mono, such problems appear to be a thing of the past.

The service is only available by invite for now as it's still in beta testing. However, that has not stopped them from partnering with top organizations across the country. So far, Mono has snapped up partnerships with Carbon, OnePipe, Swipe, Anyi Health, and Flutterwave among others.

Having completed integration with most Nigerian banks, Mono is already looking to break into new markets. In a statement to Techpoint, Mono CEO, Abdul, mentioned that they had already started pilot tests in Ghana and Kenya and are targeting a launch by next month. Interested users can request access to the API via the mono website.

The API fintech market seems to have been picking up pace over the last few months. Six months ago, Okra, another API fintech company, led by Fara Ashiru Jituboh and David Peterside, raised $1million to scale its work.

Benjamindada has reached out to Kyane Kassiri of Lateral Capital and Abdul Hassan of Mono for comments on the investment. While feedback hasn't been recorded at the time of writing, we will make sure to update as soon as we get more information.

This post has been updated to include new information from Techpoint.africa on the funding round and the amount raised.