Pngme, an African financial data platform, has raised $15 million led by Octopus Ventures led the Series A round, with follow-on investment from Lateral Capital, EchoVC and Raptor Group.
Other investors like Unshackled Ventures, Future Africa, and Two Small Fish Ventures participated too. Pngme also received funding from angel investors including Hayden Simmons of RallyCap, Plaid’s Dan Kahn, Richard Talbot of RBC Capital and Kyle Ellicott of Intersect VC.
The close of Pngme’s Series A brings its total investment to $18.5 million.
Founded by Brendan Playford and Cate Rung, Pngme started primarily as a lending platform in 2018. The startup allows financial institutions and fintechs to collect and aggregate financial data at scale. The company says its mobile SDK and data processing pipelines collect alternative financial data and unify it with other data sources to create a holistic picture of an individual’s financial behavior.
Pngme has three core products for clients in these three markets. In addition to its already known API and mobile SDK, Pngme has added a customer management platform. The company says combining the three products will drive its customers’ adoption and use of personalized user experiences and financial products.
“The pain point we solve is the cost of building the infrastructure is very high. And the data science, the data engineering talent, just globally is really hard to find. So building a data infrastructure as a service works really well because it’s a subscription to get those services which you’d normally need a five- or six-person team to build this structure”, says Playford.
Pngme will use the investment to acquire more customers. One way the company plans to make this happen is by expanding its executive team. Pngme is hiring Lorraine Kageni Maina as the CSO and Nick Masson as the CTO.
Alongside key executive hires, Pngme is expanding its data science, engineering and sales teams globally. COO Rung says Pngme’s infrastructure has processed billions of data points from hundreds of financial institutions across sub-Saharan Africa. The next plan is to double down on its Insights Library product and expand its third-party data connections to other markets over the next year.
For Octopus Ventures, the lead investor in this round, Pngme shows the need for actionable data to drive the explosion of digital fintech services for Africans.
On why the VC firm invested, Tosin Agbabiaka said, “The elegance of the technology solution, combined with an exceptional team and strong market traction with large institutions underlines our belief that Pngme will power the next generation of financial services in Africa, helping to give millions of more people access to banking and lending.”
