OnePipe, a fintech API company based in Nigeria, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding to expand its embedded finance offering.
Impact-focused in Africa VC Atlantica Ventures, which was a co-lead investor in OnePipe’s $950,000 pre-seed investment last year, joined Tribe Capital and V&R Associates to co-lead this seed round.
Canaan Partners, Saison Capital, Norrsken (the firm founded by Klarna founder Niklas Adalberth), The Fund, and Two Culture Cap were among the new investors. Existing investors Chris Adelsbach, Techstars, Ingressive Capital, Acquity, P1, Raba, and DFS Lab, as well as a few angel investors, followed up with new checks.
OnePipe’s initial strategy was to create an API gateway that would connect banks and fintechs using an uniform standard, allowing the company to execute fundamental open banking.
OnePipe, on the other hand, had to pivot because it wasn’t generating many demand cycles.
After establishing partnerships with a few banks, OnePipe decided to take a step back and explore the area of embedded finance.
Unlike open banking and data aggregation, where a company must partner with nearly every bank in the country in which it operates, this is not always the case with companies that offer embedded finance. As a result, OnePipe now has six partner banks.
OnePipe works with non-financial institutions to launch and cross-sell a variety of financial services such as credit, accounts, and payments within their products by running API infrastructure on behalf of these partner banks and helping them in monetizing it.
OnePipe has processed more than 6.3 million transactions totaling $46.3 million in the ten months after switching to this approach, according to the company. These figures come from over a million individual accounts and 138 different businesses, ranging from FMCG and retail to lending and agriculture.
