Nigerian startup making the process of sending and receiving money easy for businesses, Duplo has announced an oversubscribed seed round of $4.3 million.
The seed funding round included participation from Liquid2 Ventures, Soma Capital, Tribe Capital, Commerce Ventures, Basecamp Fund, and Y Combinator. Oui Capital also re-invested after participating in the previous $1.3 million pre-seed round.
The seed funding would help the company launch new products and expand into new business verticals in Nigeria.
Founded by Yele Oyekola and Tunde Akinnuwa, Duplo went live in January 2022. The startup has seen great traction with FMCG distributors and finance teams of midsize and enterprise businesses, helping them to digitize and simplify the way money moves between them and their business partners.
FMCG distributors can onboard retailers in their network on the Duplo platform, making it easier for them to collect payments digitally and access real-time insights into business performance.
These users can also automate payments to vendors, manufacturers, and suppliers, with instant payments enabling them to transact in larger quantities.
For finance teams, Duplo’s end-to-end solution automates the back office processes of generating and processing invoices, receiving and approving bills, collecting and disbursing funds, and completing account reconciliation.
“Duplo works seamlessly with all major accounting, and ERP platforms such as Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, QuickBooks, and Sage, and payments processed through Duplo are automatically synced with these platforms in real-time. With Duplo, businesses can cut time spent on admin tasks such as account reconciliation by up to 50 percent and reduce payment-related costs by up to 85 percent.”
The company affirms to have increased the number of businesses on its platform by 1000% in the last six months and has a Total Payment Volume that has also increased by 4200% in the last 5 months.