FairMoney, a Nigerian fintech startup has raised $42 million Series B investment to diversify its offerings and expand to become the financial hub for its users.
The investment round was led by Tiger Global Management along with existing investors from the company’s previous rounds, DST Partners, Flourish Ventures, Newfund, and Speedinvest.
The investment comes after FairMoney raised €10 million Series A two years ago and €1.2 million seed in 2018.
Founded in 2017 by Laurin Hainy, Matthieu Gendreau, and Nicolas Berthozat, FairMoney is a mobile banking platform for private and business borrowers. It is an application that uses smartphone data to build an instant credit score and give loans.
Now FairMoney is going beyond loans as it has acquired a microfinance bank license from the CBN to operate as a financial service provider in Nigeria.
“We have received our MFB banking license which now enables us to open current accounts for our users, and we’re doing that on quite a big scale,” Hainy said to TechCrunch.
“We opened accounts for our repeated and new customers, which I think is quite a unique company strategy because we don’t need to burn millions of dollars of customer acquisition cost on users like other competitors. I think all of that has enabled us to become sort of the largest digital bank in Nigeria.”
Scott Shleifer, partner at Tiger Global, said in a statement: “We are excited to partner with FairMoney as they build a better financial hub for customers in Nigeria and India.
“We were impressed by the team and the strong growth to date and look forward to supporting FairMoney as they continue to scale.”
