NIGERIA -Indicina, an Africa-focused digital lending platform that digitises the credit value chain, has raised US$3 million to fund its African expansion plans.

The company, which is already operating in Nigeria and Kenya, says it would also utilize the funds to develop new products for consumer credit recommendations and to strengthen its infrastructure.

Target Global, a pan-European venture capital firm based in Berlin, led the round, adding to its long history of investments in Nigerian businesses like as Kuda, Kippa, and Edukoya. Ricardo Schäefer, a partner of the business, will join Indicina’s board of directors. Greycroft and RV Ventures also participated in this round.

The investors were drawn to Indicina because of its novel approach to addressing Africa’s financial crisis. The company uses data to solve the loan eligibility issue that was previously determined by insufficient creditworthiness ratings.

Yvonne Johnson, Indicina’s co-founder and CEO, stated that the platform now has over 120 customers, including banks, non-bank lenders, and fintech. Polaris Bank, LipaLater, VFD, Zilla, and CreditDirect are a few examples.

“We have been working with the lenders; now we want to involve consumers. So, they see what the lender would see if they are going to apply for a loan,” Johnson said, while stressing the importance of using the funding to get to the next iteration of the company’s machine learning and data play,

She went on to say that the financing would enable Indiana to expand its product development in that area by hiring more data scientists and machine learning engineers.

“We’ve never had any balance sheet. It’s never been about offering credit for us. We want to focus on the infrastructure layer and provide good infrastructure for people to feel more comfortable,” she said.

“We want lenders to be better informed about the decisions around credit so they can go to market faster with their digital products. So, we’ve never had a business model that included our balance sheet, which we’ve always worked with the lenders.”

In 2020, Indicina raised a six-figure US dollar funding led by Green House Capital an investment company, with roughly 30% of the round as it looked to further build out its product.

Yvonne Johnson the funding would be used mainly for product development, in areas such as engineering and artificial intelligence (AI), as the startup looks to build on already-impressive uptake.

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