OnePipe raises $3.5 million seed

OnePipe, a fintech API company has raised $3.5 million seed in a round co-led by Atlantica Ventures, Tribe Capital and V&R Associates, to double down on its embedded finance offering.

Founded in 2018, OnePipe provides a standard, simple and unified API interface which combines all feature sets available across numerous providers with the ability to easily switch from one provider to the other without changing code or integration.

This recent investment is coming almost a year after the fintech API company raised a $950 pre-seed to build a super aggregator for financial service API in Nigeria.

Ope Adeoye, OnePipe's founder and CEO said "we raised a round last year to focus on one use case of the partnership, which was to pull together the APIs of a fixed set of banks and offer embedded banking or banking as a service play, [hence] we make it possible for non-financial institutions, or businesses in general, to offer banking services to their customers"

To meet the rising demand for embedded finance, OnePipe will leverage on its relationship with six bank partners to issue accounts to customers, allowing them to make payments off those accounts and access credit when they need it.

Per TechCrunch, OnePipe takes a percentage cut from transactions made on these accounts and shares with its partner banks. For loans offered via its APIs, OnePipe takes at least 1% of the loan interest from its lending partners and also shares it with the businesses and partner banks.

Aniko Szigetvari, the founding partner at Atlantica Ventures described embedded finance "as the next enabler for both traditional and financial service businesses to increase customer loyalty and revenue by offering a wide range of third-party financial products and revenue streams for their customers".

Even though its only present in Nigeria at the moment, OnePipe intends to expand across the continent citing a deal with Kenyan logistics and freight company Sendy as part of its expansion strategy.

"We made sure that before we looked into other African countries, we were going in with a customer on the ground already; We did a deal with Sendy that made them participate in this round, and we will then deploy the capital for expansion. So as they go to Egypt, South Africa, we’ll be deploying with them and grow together", Adeoye said.

Other investors that participated in the round were Canaan Partners, Saison Capital, Norrsken (the fund of Klarna founder Niklas Adalberth), The Fund and Two Culture Cap existing investors Chris Adelsbach, Techstars, Ingressive Capital, Acquity, P1, Raba and DFS Lab followed on with new checks, alongside a few angel investors.