Fintech firm Pezesha has announced that it has raised a pre-series A investment of KES 1.32 billion (USD 11 million).
The drive was a mix of $6 million in equity and $5 million debt and was led by Women’s World Banking Capital Partners II (WWBCP II).
The funds will see the startup scale its operations and enter new markets in Africa in the incoming months.
Pezesha works by offering B2B online lending infrastructure for financially excluded SMEs in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The company was founded back in 2017 by Hilda Moraa following a 2015 business model that she executed by herself.
The funds will play a key role in expanding the firm’s presence in East Africa as it eyes the West African market.
By bridging the MSME information gap and mending fragmented value chains, Pezesha has become a leader in Embedded Finance in Africa, offering productive credit to tech-enabled platforms such as Twiga Foods, Jumia, and Marketforce among dozens of others – Pezesha in a statement.
Partners integrate seamlessly with Pezesha’s APIs and offer credit among other financial services to their merchant network at the point of sale.
It uses credit scoring APIs, which act as the engine of a simple but robust process where MSMEs receive real-time loan offers to purchase stock and pay later.
Pezesha also offers financial literacy courses and debt counseling to MSMEs who do not qualify for loans in order to improve their credit scoring and ensure responsible borrowing as they grow within the Pezesha financial ladder.
Pezesha has since grown the value of its disbursements by over 2,000% through the disbursement of more than 100,000 loans to MSMEs in Kenya, Uganda, and Ghana.
The firm is also 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.
Quotes
Moraa commented about the investment: “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. 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.”
