Nigeria’s Mono Announces $15million Seed Round To Launch Its Bank-To-Bank Payment Initiation Offering

Nigeria’s Mono has raised $15 million series a round led by Tiger Global, a VC firm that had previously invested in Flutterwave and FairMoney. The latest round brings Mono’s total raise to $17.6 million since launching last year.

Existing investors including Entree Capital, Lateral Capital, GPIC, Acuity VC, and Ingressive Capital participated in the round, with new investors like Target Global, General Catalyst, and SBI Investment joining.

Last September, the company completed a $500,000 pre-seed investment with a handful of local investors. Then it took part in Y Combinator’s most recent winter batch raising $2 million in Seed funding upon graduation before raising this Series A round.

With the newly raised fund, Mono will expand its products to new countries, scale its product development efforts to meet rapidly increasing market demand, support its exponential growth, double its existing connection coverage reaching over 50 integrations, and launch its bank-to-bank payment initiation offering in Nigeria by the end of the year.

Founded in 2020 by Abdul Hassan and Prakhar Singh, Mono started as a side project to power another side project (Muney) the founders were building to fix the issue of managing multiple bank accounts for young adults in Nigeria. They wanted to build an app that could manage all our financial accounts in one place but could not find an infrastructure to support their use case and Plaid was not available in Africa. So they decided to build the Plaid for Africa, themselves.

Now Mono’s technology enables businesses and individuals to gain access to financial information stored at commercial banks. Its system gives customers more control over their financial data and account information and allows users to securely share their transaction data with third parties.

“ Our mission at Mono is to go beyond banking by making it possible to access financial accounts for data from multiple financial and non-financial sources. This can help digital businesses build innovative and more inclusive financial services. This includes financial data from digital players like big tech companies (e.g Flutterwave), fintech (e.g Kuda), or gig economy platforms (Uber), as well as traditional financial entities like insurance issuers (Tangerine), telcos (MTN), or even utility providers like electricity companies (Buypower) because every action being taken across these sources is data that can be leveraged to enhance customers financial lives.”