Grace Ashiru
Nigeria credit agency startup, Indicina has raised $3million seed to solve Africa’s credit problem. With the help of the new funding, the company will initiate its expansion into additional African markets, making it possible for businesses to make credit decisions with no risk.
The company based in Lagos has strengthened operations in Kenya and Nigeria. Aside from expanding into other African markets and strengthening its core product offerings, the company plans to use the new funding to create more lending products and improve its infrastructure.
The company’s founders are Yvonne Johnson, Jacob Ayokunle, Carlos del Carpio, and Yemi Ajao. Improving product development, more data scientists and machine learning engineers, and taking machine learning to the next level are the company’s goals.
Target Global, a pan-European venture capital firm with headquarters in Berlin, led the round of funding. Target Global has previously invested in several other Nigerian startups, including Edukayo, Kippa, and Kuda Ricardo Schaefer, a partner at the firm, who will join the board of directors of Indicina. Greycroft and RV Ventures were two of the other companies in the investment round.
Greycroft and Target Global may have been interested in investing in Indicina because of its innovative approach to resolving Africa’s credit issue. According to Will Szcxzerbiak and Szczerbiak Partners at both companies, they decided to invest in Indicina because the company uses data to solve the problem of loan eligibility, which was traditionally determined by incomplete credit score assessments.
Indicina are partners of Open finance platforms and Credit bureaus . Over One hundred and twenty-one financial institutions and other organizations use the platform examples are LipaLater, Credit Direct Zilla, Polaris Bank and VFD and more . Indicina says it has processed more than 3 billion ($5 million) in loans from 10,000 bank statements and paid out more than 700 million ($1.17 million) to clients.
Customers’ API calls to analyze financial documents generate revenue for the company. Indiana plans to launch a business-to-consumer service in the next few weeks to add to its product line and find new ways to make money. Even though it has already done this for lenders, it believes that consumers will also benefit from real-time analysis of their bank statements. To put it another way, it’s like Credit Karma, which is a platform for tracking and managing one’s credit.
