Bfree, a Nigerian credit management fintech, has raised $1.7 million in a pre-Series A round to fund its planned global expansion.
With the funding, Bfree will expand operations into16 new markets including Ghana, India, Uganda, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Russia, Poland, Pakistan and Indonesia. This is as it grows beyond Nigeria, where it began before entering Kenya in July last year.
The investors that participated in the latest round included 4Di Capital, Octerra Capital, VestedWorld, Voltron Capital, Logos Ventures, and several other angel investors, bringing the total capital raised by the startup to $2.5 million, having bagged $800,000 in a seed round.
Founded in 2020 by Chukwudi Enyi, Moses Nmor, and Julian Flosbach (CEO), Bfree focuses on consumers’ financial health by building a tech-enabled ethical credit management company that makes collection processes in Africa more scalable, efficient, and user-friendly.
The startup presently works with 30 credit institutions, including digital lenders, micro-finance institutions and banks. Using customer data provided by the lenders, the startup builds the user profiles of defaulters, and runs their data through an algorithm to predict their behavior and recommend the best collection method.
According to the startup, it has so far followed up with 1.1 million defaulters to date, and are currently handling around 800,000 customers, majority of them in Nigeria.
CEO Flosbach comments: “We saw that there was like a little bit of a breach in the value proposition of lenders — they are good at giving out loans, but the aftersales services of the credit market didn’t work as collections processes were inefficient and not user friendly.”
Flosbach adds that Bfree employs the use of ethical debt collection standards and works closely with defaulters for tailor-made settlement options, with the end goal of increasing the repayment rate and customer satisfaction.
