KENYA – Ubawa Technologies, 2021 African Start-up Awards Start-up of the Year winners for Kenya, has secured US$350,000 in seed funding from Nigerian VC Platform Capital.

The deal was match made through the South African platform Merge, and signals Platform Capital’s commitment to growth markets throughout the continent.

Ubawa offers cognitive data analytics through in-house software and infrastructure solutions alongside its payments processing platform.

The fintech platform was founded by Wesley Masinde in 2021 and creates a better shopping experience through a proprietary payment processing platform, PAYCLOUD, and a conversational AI engine that can integrate into various social media channels and aggregate their inventory into a single dashboard.

This allows businesses to accept payments from all compatible payment apps.

An in-house team of experts develops systems that further enhance Ubawa’s value offering, providing cognitive data discovery services and analytics through innovative infrastructure and software solutions.

These solutions include disbursement services to help with internal payments management and automated reconciliation processes.

Ubawa’s payment gateway pulls together SMS, USSD, web, apps and social media, and allows clients to offer a wide range of options to their customers.

Merge is looking to be Africa’s go-to platform for start-ups looking to raise capital from investors locally and globally and played a key role in the funding round.

New Fund

This comes as Indian based Venture Capitalists, Aavishkaar Capital (Aavishkaar) forms a new fund in partnership with KfW, a German state-owned investment and development bank, that is focused on investing in Africa and Asia.

The KSh28.2 billion (US$248.35m) “ESG First Fund” focused on strengthening the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) practice of mid-cap businesses while offering them flexible capital to scale to new markets.

Leveraging on the global drive for sustainability and equality, the ESG First Fund is a fund focused on investing in Africa and Asia with the mandate of generating superior ESG outcomes and commercially viable financial returns alongside positive social impact.

The ESG First Fund will seek to provide transformational capital which can be invested across the capital structure, helping businesses improve their ESG standards so that they can capitalize on the increasing consumer preference for ecologically conscious, gender-equal and purpose-driven businesses.

It will also meet the increasing demands on corporate due diligence in the course of regulatory measures in the European market The Fund aims to partner with mid-cap businesses and entrepreneurs sharing Aavishkaar’s goal for enhanced ESG standards to deepen their access to markets in Europe.

The ESG First Fund is in general open to all sectors but focuses on those with high exports towards Europe.

The Fund is a global initiative with an investment process centred on ESG, gender equality and climate change goals. The Fund investment strategy aims to measure ESG improvements across value chain while providing catalytic capital across the capital structure, for mid-market businesses.

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