EAST AFRICA – Kuunda, a B2B2c fintech solutions provider, has closed its US$2.25 million seed round, in line with our recent brand relaunch.
The fund was led by Accion Venture Lab, Finca Ventures, Launch Africa, Seedstars, Mercy Corps Ventures, Greenhouse Capital, Kepple Africa Ventures, Future Africa, The Magic Fund, and other fintech angel investors.
Kuunda provides liquidity to the informal sector through their liquidity API, proprietary credit scoring algorithms, to generate behavioural and transactional borrowing profiles.
Kuunda specialises in real-time, transactional based lending solutions. Kuunda is using this seed round to scale up operations in Tanzania and Pakistan, as well as to launch partnerships in Uganda, Malawi, DRC, Zambia, Mozambique, Nigeria & Egypt within the next 18 months.
“Agents and micro businesses are often the main way that underserved populations in Africa and Asia access financial services, but they face massive liquidity gaps that make it harder to serve their communities,” said Michael Schlein, President and CEO of Accion.
“Kuunda provides solutions for agents and micro merchants that enable them to grow their businesses while also helping their communities grow and thrive. We are thrilled to welcome Kuunda to the Accion Venture Lab portfolio.”
Kuunda was founded in 2018 by a team of experienced entrepreneurs and digital financial service experts. With a combined 45 years working in the industry, the team realised that despite best efforts, the liquidity challenges faced by agents, small businesses, and consumers in emerging economies were rife and ongoing.
Through time spent on the ground and in the field across Africa and Asia, the team came to recognise the pivotal role that agents, small businesses, and consumers play within their respective economies.
Developing solutions to solve people’s access to liquidity was therefore key to resolving economic hardships and to help build resilience and improve economic productivity. This is what defined Kuunda’s mission to become the leading liquidity solutions provider to financially underserved users in emerging economies.
“Since our inception, we have been on a mission to solve the liquidity challenges felt by many the world over. Not only has the lack of access to liquidity been an economic inhibitor, but it has also been a factor that has negatively impacted the growth of individual productivity within an economy,” Andrew Milne, CEO of Kuunda Holdings Limited said.
“Our end goal is not to give a loan, our liquidity solutions are tools for all people to grow their businesses and enable individuals to feel free and be more resilient.
“In short, we offer solutions to enable our users to grow and develop. We envision a world where financially underserved populations have fair access to financial solutions that serve their needs.”
Kuunda creates dynamic borrower profiles that are built on real-time behavioural data acquired through its proprietary credit scoring algorithms. These profiles are also built via access to their channel partners’ existing infrastructure and networks.
These partners provide insights into the transactional patterns of agents, small businesses and consumers, allowing Kuunda’s channel partners to accurately determine those with the most pressing financing need and the highest propensity to repay.
Through these lending channels, Kuunda has been able to distribute tailored financial products that don’t contribute to the large-scale indebtedness that often plagues these economies, but rather build resilience into these user networks by giving them the ability to respond to the friction and flow experienced within their individual income patterns.
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