KENYA – Pezesha, a Kenyan founded Pan-African embedded finance fintech startup, has raised a pre-series A funding round of US$11 million in a mix of US$6 million equity and US$5 million debt.
The round was led by Women’s World Banking Capital Partners II (WWBCP II) with participation from Verdant Frontiers Fintech Fund (an early stage African Fintech Fund), cFund and IOG, (both web3 focused ventures), Talanton and Verdant Capital Specialist Funds investing debt in this round.
In a statement, the company said it will use the funds to significantly scale operations in its core markets in East Africa and expand its digital lending infrastructure to the West African market.
Pezesha offers a B2B digital lending infrastructure focused on providing affordable working capital to financially excluded SMEs in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Headquartered in Kenya, Pezesha was founded in 2017 by Hilda Moraa, a 2nd time Fintech entrepreneur who successfully exited her first Fintech business in 2015.
The company has built robust APIs to originate quality SMEs and original credit scoring models that allow capital to flow efficiently and productively. Currently, the company offers productive credit to tech-enabled platforms such as Twiga Foods, Jumia and Marketforce among dozens of others.
Partners integrate seamlessly with Pezesha’s APIs and offer credit among other financial services to their merchant network at the point of sale. Pezesha’s credit scoring APIs act as the engine of a simple but robust process where MSMEs receive real time loan offers to purchase stock and pay later.
In the last 2 years Pezesha says they have grown the value of its disbursements over 2,000% through disbursement of more than 100,000 loans to MSMEs in Kenya, Uganda, and Ghana.
“We are excited about attracting institutional investors led by the Women’s World Banking Capital Partners II to harness our growth plans and push our mission to the next level,” said the company’s founder and CEO Hilda Moraa.
“We are equally excited that WWBCP II intentionally invests in women, which allows us to cement inclusivity in our growth plans as a sustainable path towards our vision of building Africa’s MSME lending infrastructure.
“Additionally, this round has brought together strategic investors who underpin the fundamentals of financial inclusion in their thesis and we believe these combined experiences will help us accelerate and enable millions of MSMEs across African value chains to access affordable working capital.”
At the same time, Pezesha announced its opening up the debt liquidity market by working with strategic institutional investors such as IOG-Cardano.
Through this partnership, the company can access affordable capital by layering DeFi liquidity channels on top of the scalable digital lending infrastructure.
“I’m delighted to announce our investment in Pezesha. Facilitating the movement of capital into emerging markets to support economic growth and job creation is a core promise of blockchain and cryptocurrencies,” co-founder of IOG and Cardano, Charles Hoskinson said.
“Our vision is centered on using technology to make it easier for people across the globe to borrow and lend to each other in a regulated way. This investment in Pezesha is an important milestone, and we’re excited to be a part of their growth story.”
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