NIGERIA – Lagos-based buy now pay later (BNPL) startup Klump has raised a US$780,000 pre-seed funding round to help it launch its flagship “Pay with Klump” product.
The funding round was led by London-based investment firm Seedcamp, with participation from MAGIC Fund, Voltron Capital, Yellowwood, Kickoff Africa, Hoaq Capital, Kesho VC, Assembly Investors.
The round also attracted participation from several angel investors and founders, including Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, CEO of Flutterwave; Will Neale, founder of Grabyo; Michael Pennington, founder of Gumtree; Richmond Bassey, CEO of Bamboo among others.
The funding will be used for further developing Klump’s credit decision and checkout engine, building the team, developing merchant partnerships, and offering affordable financing to its customers.
Founded in 2021 by Celestine Omin and Olufunbi Falayi, Klump offers customers the option to buy and receive their purchases right away and spread the payments over four equal installments.
The first payment is made at the point of checkout and the remainder can be spread out over 3 months with a small interest rate applied to the balance.
As the adoption of BNPL continues to grow globally, Klump’s vision is to become the preferred alternative online checkout and in-store payment processing company.
The startup leverages its proprietary credit eligibility and fraud detection engine to make an informed credit decision on a customer in less than three minutes, with a goal to further reduce the decision time to less than a minute.
“Our BNPL offering is a natural next step in the development of the African e-commerce sector, and we intend to be at the forefront by developing the capability to make credit decisions on customers in real-time,” said Celestine Omin, Co-founder.
“At the same time, we want to help merchants achieve commercial prosperity by providing the tools to offer their customers the option to pay in small installments.”
The platform can quickly make sound credit eligibility decisions, facilitate transactions to approved customers, make disbursements to merchants, and effectively drive collections from customers with a flexible and efficient collections system.
Klump has partnered with AltSchool, an alternative tech academic institution, to provide laptop financing to its students, as well as with Betastore, a B2B retail platform, to provide inventory financing to its retail customers.
The startup is also rolling out other large-scale partnerships over the next few weeks with an initial focus on marketplaces with higher-margin and discretionary-spend categories.
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