Grace Ashiru
The venture capital firm HAVAC, based in Cape Town, has made its third investment in the Kenyan fintech company Tanda.
As part of a current pre-series A investment, the company’s $20 million HAVAC Universum Core African Fund is investing alongside three other investors, including DFS Lab.
Tanda is in an excellent position to continue solving two of Africa’s most significant growth problems with the help of HAVA-C.
One of these problems is digitizing retail payments to make them faster, cheaper, and easier to use. Another is giving unbanked Africans, and small businesses access to critical financial services like lending, saving, and wealth management. Tanda is in an excellent position to continue overcoming these challenges.
Thanks to the financing, the company will be able to grow operations in Kenya and East Africa, accelerate product development, and invest in key strategic partners over the next 15 months.
Tanda is also launching a new brand identity to better show how its product line is growing.
Among these are apps like Tanda Trader, which lets businesses get paid, sell digital goods, and get money; Tanda Pocket is a digital wallet with virtual cards that can be used to make purchases, keep track of finances, and make a budget. Tanda I/O is an API library that allows businesses to collect and distribute payments across mobile networks, agents, and utility service providers.
The news came after HAVAIC invested in ShopEx, FinAccess, and Talk360, bringing the total number of high-potential early-stage digital companies in Africa to 17.
At the moment, HAVAIC’s portfolio companies serve more than five million customers in more than 180 countries. In 2021, the portfolio got 110 million dollars in new funding, which boosted its income by 160 percent.
HAVIAC has had four successful international exits up to this point, bringing in much more money than its annual goal of 30%.
Techbuild’s take
Since its launch in 2018, Tanda has built one of Africa’s largest open agent networks available to all financial service providers. It has also improved interactions between customers and businesses and opened up the ecosystem so that other developers can add new products.
The business has done more than four million deals in the last four years. It has also helped more than 800,000 people, more than 100,000 developers (like Twiga Foods and Bento), and more than 30,000 businesses.
This round of funding comes after two others in 2019 and 2020, all led by HAVAC, the company that first invested in Tanda.
