Churpy, a Kenyan fintech startup, has raised a $1 million seed funding aimed at supporting expansion to Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa.
The seed round was led by Unicorn Growth Capital with participation from other investors including Antler East Africa, Nairobi’s business angel network and a group of Rally Cap LPs.
Churpy was founded in 2020 by John Kiptum and Kennedy Mukuna, the fintech offers an integrated receivables management product for B2B. They support account reconciliation, connectivity with multiple Bank APIs and an invoice payment marketplace for instance, Direct debits, Card, MoMo and Bank rails.
The startup collaborates with some of the largest banks in the region including Citibank, Sidian, Stanbic and NCBA — through its API, which gives businesses using its SaaS product access to real-time statements and transaction data that can be used to reconcile pending invoices from enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) — used to tract daily company activities like accounting and supply chain operations
Recently the startup received $15 million from Trade Development Bank to it lend to SMEs through its banking partners.
Churpy co-founder and CEO, John Kiptum said,”we are hiring more people as we plan to enter Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, which are the hubs into their [respective] regions. We are also putting finances into product development as we plan to scale our offering.”
“SMEs have a huge financing gap. They are the suppliers of these large companies and need capital to continue to bring raw materials to their other customers.
Unicorn Growth Capital founding partner and CEO Barbara Iyayi said: “It is clear that B2B payment operations are significantly under-penetrated and ripe for modernization and disruption globally.
