Tech in Africa
Mono has been selected for Y Combinator’s W21 startup accelerator program which enables companies and developers to gain access to financial accounts for historical and present transactions, bank statements, balances, credits, and customer spending patterns.
Mono a Nigerian fintech founded in August 2020, strives to help digital businesses across Africa gain access to customer financial and identity data. The plug and play technology allow customers such as Flutterwave, Indicina, and Carbon.
Mono was launched in 2020 by founders Abdul Hassan and Prakhar Singh. The duo began working on Mono in June last year. The product allows customers to access customers’ financial accounts, retrieve vital information such as income statements, historical transactions, balances, incomes, expenses, and account owner identification. All this requires user consent when logging in with their mobile or internet credentials.
Mono launched its beta, a month later and closed the $500,000 pre-seed investment round from Ventures Platform, Lateral Capital, Golden Palm Investments, and Rally Cap. This was a record-shattering pre-seed investment given the raising of funds in record time.
Over half of West Africans are unbanked and Mono’s offering a solution that promotes financial inclusion through open finance. Open finance flourishes on access to financial information transparency through open APIs where new routes of making money access to information and entry for the underbanked are created.
Mono currently operates in Nigeria and is looking to expand to Ghana and Kenya.
In addition to participating in one of the world’s biggest accelerator programmes, Mono will reap from a $125,000 award for 7% equity. It will also benefit from Y-Combinator and its network of funding partners.
