Report by Joel Nwankwo
Leading Nigerian B2B2C payment startup, Nomba recently announced an oversubscribed round led by San Francisco-based Base10 Partners (investors in Nubank, Plaid, and Brex).
The pre-series B round also saw participants including Helios Digital Ventures, Shopify, Partech, and Khosla Ventures, coming together to raise $30 million.
Yinka Adewale, CEO and co-founder of Nomba speaking noted that the startup sees payment as a business model, not simply a product, while also stating that the business wants to make it easier for businesses to take advantage of all that is possible in their payment processes to support their continued growth and success.
The CEO added that the startup has been working on a variety of products, and the latest investment and investors’ interests gives them a lot of confidence in what can be accomplished when business owners have access to more effective payment methods.
By announcing an oversubscribed round, Nomba had received greater investor supply than they demanded. While several African startups struggled for investors’ attention, Nomba kicked off the new month with a round that saw more investors competing to give them money than they wanted to raise.
Nomba’s business and marketing strategy had seen them change from Kudi to Nomba in April last year. The change of name was in line with the fintech’s desire to shift from a single payment platform to an omnichannel payment platform. New service channels like payment collections, trade finance, business reporting, and multiple location administration have been created by the new omni-channel payment platform, making operations considerably simpler.
Staying Competitive
Nomba has developed over time into a successful, omnichannel payment service provider from its first introduction as “Kudi.ai” in 2016, a chatbot integration that responds to financial demands on social apps. The startup now offers a variety of payment solutions, management and banking tools, and other services to more than 300,000 businesses to help them run their operations more efficiently. The company processes $1 billion in transactions each month, which is the highest gross transaction value (GTV) for an African payment service provider.
Nomba’s progress is no easy feat when considering the competitiveness in Nigeria’s fintech space. With the fintech giants and unicorns like Esusu, Opay and Flutterwave already operating in the target market, Nomba has been able to establish itself as a dominant payment and B2B2C channel for Nigerian businesses and entrepreneurs.
Luci Fonseca, a partner at Base10, expressed excitement on the latest investment as the organisaria as one of africa’s startup power houseion was more than willing to help Nomba provide their revolutionary solutions to fuel business expansion and success both within Nigeria and abroad. According to her, ‘Nomba is one of the most intriguing businesses in Africa because of its history of innovation and capital efficiency.’
A Nigerian Thing
As a major propagator of tech in Africa, it only makes sense that Nigerian startups raise expansion funds. Nigeria functions as the continent’s largest economy, home to 3 of Africa’s 5 ‘unicorns’ (start-ups valued at over $1bn) and has the continent’s largest number of tech-driven companies.
Nigerian startups still possess the qualities required to draw investors and change the financial outlook of the nation and the continent at large, despite the fact that economic uncertainty, escalating inflation, worries about Nigeria’s managed exchange rate, and security concerns have combined to drive away international growth capital.
With its most recent round, Nomba will supply a variety of business tools, including order management and invoicing solutions, which the company claims will increase productivity and save operating costs for companies throughout the continent.
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