Nigerian Open Banking Startup Mono Picks Up US$15m Series A

Lagos-headquartered open banking startup Mono has raised US$15 million in a Series A. The round was led by Flutterwave’s backer Tiger Global.

Participating investors included a mix of new backers Target Global (which also invested in Kuda Bank), General Catalyst, and SBI Investment, alongside previous investors Entree Capital, Lateral Capital, GPIC, Acuity VC, and Ingressive Capital.

The funding brings Mono’s total capital pool to US$17.6 million, the company said. Prior to the Series A, Mono has also raised US$500,000 in a pre-seed round in September last year, and a US$2.1 million seed round from Y Combinator in January this year (data according to Crunchbase).

The company is valued upwards of US$100 million, according to TechCrunch. Mono’s South Africa expansion could happen as soon as this year, through a partnership with Absa bank, the report said.

Mono’s products provide access to customer banking data, collect bank payments directly, help to manage finances and linked accounts, and enable no-code bank statement and payment collection.

Mono has grown 45x year-on-year

So far, the fintech startup has processed over 200 million financial data transactions, and has connected with over 150,000 bank accounts just in the last two months.

That’s a growth of 45x year-on-year, according to TechCrunch. The 2020-founded startup also has a presence in Ghana, and plans to expand into Kenya, Egypt and South Africa.

The company is also expanding vertically, with enterprise solutions for non-tech industries such as FMCG and law.

Abdul Hassan
“We wanted to build an app that could manage all our financial accounts in one place, but we couldn’t find an infrastructure to support our use case and Plaid wasn’t available in Africa, so we decided to build the Plaid for Africa, ourselves,”