![]() ![]() Joining them in the round were Kevin Johnson, former CEO of Ebates at Rakuten, f7 Ventures, Blackbird Ventures, Scribble Ventures, Hyper, Susa Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures, Wischoff Ventures, Exits Capital, Knight Capital Ancestry CEO Deborah Liu Firstbase CEO Chris Herd and XMTP co-founder and president Shane Mac. Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) across Africa make up the bulk - over 90% - of businesses in the continent but are still marginalized in accessing credit from formal institutions because of the nature of their operations for instance, many often lack the kind of collateral that is acceptable by banks. The growth plans come against the backdrop of a $12.3 million pre-Series A equity-debt funding round led by Serena Ventures with participation from Breega, 4Di Capital, Launch Africa, Soma Capital and Y Combinator, VCs that are all making their first investment in Uganda. Spurred by an increase in demand for its services, Numida is currently eyeing growth opportunities beyond Uganda, saying that it has a proven business model that can be adopted across the continent to unlock the potential of MSMEs. To bridge the gap, Uganda-based fintech Numida has opted to focus its digital lending business on small enterprises as part of its strategy for driving financial inclusion in emerging markets. Numida Serena Ventures Startups Uganda Y Combinator One of these is that users essentially deposit money into a Satispay account from their existing bank accounts to spend over a period of time, much like a pre-pay account, which helps them control what they spend monthly. Today, a startup out of Italy called Satispay - which operates an independent payment network that bypasses big banks and credit companies and promises lower transactions fees plus other benefits like better budget control to its users - is picking up a massive round of funding on the back of strong demand for its services. (which Dalmasso says is probably the most similar to Satispay in terms of how it operates) peer-to-peer payment efforts like PayPal’s Venmo and Square’s Cash App buy-now, pay-later services and the plethora of blockchain-based efforts to build out new currencies and means of buying and selling and much more. The ever-expanding group also includes companies like Dwolla in the U.S. They include helping city governments provide food stamps to users (which are deposited as a sum on Satispay to be used for food purchases) and a surge of use during COVID when people wanted to pay for items remotely or even in person without even tapping phones or taking out cards, using just Satispay’s app on their devices to complete purchases. He and others on the team could see what was coming around the corner earlier in the year, he added, and although Airwallex still had significant money in the bank - $600 million out of the total $900 million raised as of the end of September, when Zhang and I spoke - the startup chose to raise more, just in case.Īddition Italy payments satispay Startups Airwallex, the Hong Kong/Australia startup that provides cross-border banking and other financial services for businesses, has raised $100 million, money that it will be using to continue expanding its business operationally, geographically and with new products in areas like credit and expense management - and for M&A. Airwallex, as we’ve written before, made a splash when it was first founded by doing the right thing at the right time: it did the tough work of integrating with lots of banks and building complex financial services and then made them easy to use (leaning on APIs) so that companies doing business across country boundaries could set up banking and money moving services quickly, initially out of Asia Pacific and eventually globally. ![]() Unlike other funds aimed at expanding a product’s ecosystem like the Alexa Fund at Amazon or the Slack Fund, Capital 49 is not operated off Airwallex’s balance sheet, instead tapping a number of Airwallex’s investors as LPs but using Airwallex’s knowledge of the market to guide it. Airwallex Capital 49 Salesforce Ventures square peg Startups ![]()
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