Rand Merchant Investment (RMI) subsidiary, AlphaCode announced on Monday, 2 September 2019, that it has awarded about $1.5 million in supplier development loans to three South African fintech startups, Zande Africa, Bright On Capital and Livestock Wealth.
AlphaCode is a support system for fintech startups that want to scale their businesses. We help to steer raw talent viaour Explore programme where we provide the basic skill sets to build a business, our Incubate programme provides grantmoney to get the business going and then the Accelerate programme helps participants to scale, says Dominique Collett, head of AlphaCode. We also provide a full hybrid of support in addition to these programmes providing grant money, equity and debt funding. We are seeing our approach paying dividends and we look forward to providing funding to more exceptional, growing fintechs.
We have granted Zande and Bright On, with whom we’ve been associated for over four years, around $658 thousand in supplier development loans each and Livestock Wealth has been granted $131 thousand, says Collett. Businesses like these don’t always get the funding they require to grow from commercial funders but as part of our commitment to partner and grow financial services startups, we’ve leveraged our supplier development spending tosupport them.
Zande Africa started in 2016 with just two founders, Siya Ntutela and Mdu Thabethe. The business provides trade and
merchant finance to spaza shops to enable stock purchases. It now has a turnover of $1.1 million with 71 staff and it is
about to open a third depot in Orange Farm, south of Johannesburg.
Bright On Capital is an online peer-to-peer lender that provides affordable working capital funding to emerging small
supplier businesses with sustainable growth prospects. It has grown its SME lending book beyond $1.6 million and expects the lending book to exceed $3.2million by early 2020.
Livestock Wealth has pioneered investment in cows since October 2015 and now has over 2000 cows at various partner-farms. These are valued at over $2.6 million and managed like an investment portfolio on behalf of 1200 local and international investors.
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