Kenyan fintech startup Pezesha has secured a seven-figure seed extension round led by GreenHouse Capital (GHC).

The round also included GHC’s sister company Venture Garden Group, which provided “on-lending liquidity support,” the company said. The funding will be used to help the lending infrastructure startup in expanding its presence across Africa.

The extension round tops up previous investments by Seedstars last year, and Consonance in 2018 (according to Crunchbase). Pezesha also raised an undisclosed seed round from Kuramo Capital in 2018.

Pezesha is a 2016-founded startup that enables non-traditional finance institutions to provide working capital to SMEs through the company’s lending infrastructure.

Pezesha connects SMEs with lenders through its tech

The company’s digital financial infrastructure helps to connect SMEs to banks and financial institutions for their working capital needs. The company’s end-to-end digital API infrastructure helps to determine the credit score of these small-time merchants, and match them with lenders.

Pezesha has a presence in Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria, and has plans for a launch in Uganda this month as well.

“GHC’s investment will catapult our growth by enabling us to scale our existing partnerships with the likes of Twiga Foods, Jumia, Marketforce, and Popote Pay, among others. More so, the investment will unlock our vision of building the operating system to power embedded finance in Africa,”

Hilda Moraa, CEO and Founder of Pezesha, said.

The startup holds a regulatory approval by Kenya’s Capital Markets Authority (CMA), and successfully exited the CMA Regulatory Sandbox last year, becoming the first Kenyan company to do so.

At the sandbox, the startup spent 12 months testing a crowdfunding model to reach underserved SMEs through Pezesha’s “holistic trust infrastructure.” The test objective involved structuring SME debt notes so that investors or lenders could invest in SMEs assessed by the company, through structured loan notes and diversified lending options.

Featured image credit: Pezesha (in image: Pezesha Kenya Team)