Anchor, Nigerian fintech startup raises $1 million in pre-funding
Nigeria’s bank-as-a-service fintech startup, Anchor, has raised $1 million in pre-funding. The Y Combinator-backed startup plans to use this investment to attract top talent, improve the company’s technology infrastructure, invest in compliance and regulatory infrastructure, and acquire customers.
Investors backing BaaS fintech include Byld Ventures, Y Combinator, Luno Expeditions, Niche Capital, Mountain Peak Capital and angel investors such as SeamlessHR CEO Emmanuel Okeleji.
The startup, founded last year by Segun Adeyemi, Olamide Sobowale and Gbekeloluwa Olufotebi, offers APIs, dashboards and tools that help developers embed and build banking products such as bank accounts, money transfers, savings products, issuing cards, and offering loans.
Anchor claims multi-million dollar revenue while growing 200% month-on-month. The startup makes money by charging fees and taking a cut from all billable parts of the business: account issuance, money movements, savings and deposits among others.
What they say
- Co-founder and CEO of Anchor, Segun Adeyemi, announced the company’s fundraising: “After months of building and talking to our early customers, we’re excited to come out of private beta and launch our public beta with a pre-seed round led by Byld Ventures.
- “We also entered the Y Combinator Summer 2022 batch as the first banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform from Africa. At Anchor, we provide API and tools for businesses to create accounts, transfer funds, offer savings, issue card and do more for their customers, enabling them to increase revenue by offering and embedding financial services into their products.”
- Speaking about the company’s solutions, Adeyemi said: “We are now seeing a new development where companies want to offer various products and financial services beyond just payments. We are convinced that the way is not just by locking banking-as-a-service onto a payment platform, but that it must be the right banking-as-a-service platform built with the right infrastructure and go-to-market strategy. That’s the problem we set out to solve as a team, basically the complete end-to-end infrastructure for startups to be able to build, embed and launch financial services.”
Adeyemi said his journey to Anchor began in 2015 when he co-founded Amplifypay, a company focused on recurring payments and direct debit. In 2019, one of the largest digital banks in Africa, Carbon acquired Amplifypay. Between 2019 and 2021, he worked at JUMO, the largest provider of credit infrastructure in Africa. During this period, he also advised some of the largest fintech and digital banks in Nigeria.
