Mono, launched two months ago with the mission of becoming the go-to financial data infrastructure API platform in Africa to finalize its product, sign up more partners and expand across the continent.
“Today, we’re happy to announce that we have raised a $500k pre-seed round to continue building out what Plaid would look like for Africa. We’re extremely proud of the team’s relentless work and passion to get to this point,” announced the startup’s co-founders Abdulhamid Hassan and Prakhar Singh.
The investors included Lateral Capital, Ventures Platform and Golden Palm Capital, Rally Capital and angel investors Idriss bello, Olumide Soyombo, among others.
Launched in August 2020, Mono has connected over 16 financial institutions in Nigeria, launched the easiest way to retrieve bank statements with customers and signed up partnerships with firms such as Carbon, Anyihealth, Swipe and dozens of developers.
The new funding will help the firm continue its product efforts to expand coverage of its Data API to include more sources (USSD) and countries. It will also launch Direct debit in partnership with Payment gateways and develop new API verticals and developer tools as well as hire a core team for expansion.
Mono, with teams spread across its HQ in Lagos and India, wants to be the easiest, fastest and better way to get access to your customers financial accounts for account statement, account balance, transactions,
account verification and initiate bank to bank payments.
The firm is building a new way to connect to financial accounts without screen scraping as its API offers live data, blazing fast
Mono also adds that “screen-scraping” is not interactive hence it can take long before the user gets any feedback. Mono supports both banks and digital banks and charges $200/mo for 10k API calls for all its endpoints. Mono comes with free 100 live API calls and is currently by invite only.
On Direct Debit, Mono has partnered with Flutterwave to allow clients who want to do direct debit payment with Mono APIs. With a mission to become the platform that enables access to customers’ financial accounts in Africa, one connection at a time, Mono is currently available for GTBANK, Access, Standard Chartered , Kuda, Fidelity, Barter, First bank, FCMB, Stanbic IBTC, Zenith, UBA.