Kuda, Nigeria’s digital-first bank has raised a $10 million seed round to bank every African on the planet, wherever they are in the world.
The $10 million was led by Target Global, with Entrée Capital and SBI Investment with the participation of Raffael Johnen (founder of Auxmoney), Johan Lorenzen (founder of Holvi), Brandon Krieg/Ed Robinson (founders of Stash), and Oliver and Lish Jung-angel investors in Nubank, Revolut, and Chime.
In September last year, Kuda raised $1.6 million pre-seed investment funding from Startupbootcamp, Haresh Aswani of the Tolaram Group, Ragnar Meitern (an early investor in Monese and Bolt) and other angel investors.
During the $1.6m raise Babs Ogundeyi, Kuda founder and CEO said:“We’ll use this money to launch out of beta later this year, our immediate priorities are continuous product improvement and excellent customer support, so the funds we’ve raised will be used to expand our software development and customer support teams and equip them with the best tools available.”
Kuda, Nigeria’s first free bank, fully licensed by the Central Bank of Nigeria was co-founded by Babs Ogundeyi and CTO Musty Mustapha is planning on a much bigger Series A to grow from its 300,000 customers in Nigeria to cover Africans on the continent and in the diaspora.
Kuda processes over $500 million of transactions each month and aims to cover and is growing its team and operations to reach more in its home market with a population of over 200 million then expand across Africa and in the diaspora.
Kuda is a digital-only bank that runs predominantly on smartphones, therefore needs no physical locations to provide full banking services. For users who have no smartphones, the firm has a USSD version.
Being digital-only means Kuda saves a lot of cash as it’s not renting and maintaining branches, making it possible for it to charge less or even free. The bank does not charge card maintenance fees or account maintenance fees or any other fees from its customers.
