Nigerian Fintech Company- Wallets Africa raised an undisclosed amount of money on 24 June from a host of investors, to expand its operations in Africa.
The investors include Mozilla Corporation, 9Yards Capital, Samurai Incubate and Michael Seibel, the Y Combinator CEO. Other investors who had previously invested in the company are-Maria Alegre, CEO of Chartboost, Microtraction, Venture Souq and Brad Flora. The startup is headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria.
Founded in 2018, Wallets Africa is digital financial platform that strives to make transacting easier for Africans and visitors to the continent with an app and a card. Founder and CEO, John Oke, expressed his desire for the startup to be Africa’s foremost borderless digital financial platform. Wallets Africa users can pay into the bank accounts directly and pay utility bills as well.
In the coming months and years, Wallets Africa will also offer savings, lending and investment products as well in order to solve people’s financial problems across the continent. Through Wallets, one can also send money to mobile money accounts in Ghana and Kenya.
John Oke was a software engineer at SureGifts, a gift voucher company. He was closely working with the mobile money service M-Pesa (Kenya), when he noticed that SureGifts voucher could be used to pay at an M-Pesa at a mall or buy tickets for a movie in Nairobi. This epiphany that soon financial transactions could be done via digital wallets in Nigeria, led to the creation of Wallets Africa in 2018.
In March 2019, Wallets Africa made it into Y Combinator (YC). This gave the startup a big break. Before making into Y Combinator, the startup had around17,000 users and processed US$ 2M monthly. Post-YC, this figure jumped to more than US$ 6.7M per month. Today they have over 43,000 users.
“We are becoming a 360-degree payment instrument for businesses and consumers, we’ll continue to work with banks and organisations across the world to build digital financial channels for the next billion internet users”, said CEO John Oke.
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