Kuda bank, Nigeria’s first wholly digital bank, raises $55 million in a Series B funding round to expand further into other African countries.
The round was co-led by past investors Valar Ventures and Target Global, Japan-based company Strategic Business Investment (SBI), and some previous angel investors also participated in this round.
This funding which was made at a $500 million evaluation comes after raising $25million in Series A funding round in March 2021 and a $10million seed round in November 2020. Following a $1.6 million pre-seed raise in September 2019 and a $15,000 pre-seed raise in 2015, Kuda bank’s total raise comes to $91.6 million.
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According to Techcrunch, Kuda Bank was not proactively looking to raise money when Series B started and closed, and as such Series B round was relatively fast.
Established in 2018 as Kudimoney, it changed its name to Kuda in 2019 just before a $1.6 million raise in 2019. Babs Ogundeyi and Musty Mustapha who holds the position of CTO are the brains behind Kuda which is dubbed as the bank for the free. It was founded as a lending platform before it transitioned to a digital bank.
Raise Of Its Users
Kuda’s equity round was completed in fast succession, after the digital bank’s outstanding early development. Now Kuda has more than 1.4 million registered users, surpassing the registered users of 65,000 it had in March. Ricardo Schäfer, Partner at Target Global expressed excitement on what Kuda is building and said,
“We felt that Babs and Musty are ambitious on another level. For them, it was always about building a pan-African bank, not just a Nigerian leader. The prospect of banking over 1 billion people from day one stood out for me at the beginning.”
Kuda also plans to launch new product offerings for its Nigerian market. One of its products is the Kuda Bank Overdraft. Not wanting to give much away, Ogundeyi said,
“It’s a unique product, an overdraft that we pre-qualify the most active users for. In Q2, it qualified over 200,000 users and pushed out $20 million worth of credit. With a 30-day repayment so far, default has been minimal because of the company’s approach.
General partner at Valar Ventures, Andrew McCormack had this to say,
“Kuda is our first investment in Africa, and our initial confidence in the team has been upheld by its rapid growth in the past four months”.
We await to see the upcoming product and all its offerings.
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