Duplo, a Y Combinator backed Nigerian fintech, has raised $1.3 million to digitise payment flows for B2B companies.
The pre-seed round was led by early-stage pan-African VC firm Oui Capital to further its growth. A mix of local and international investors such as MyAsia VC, Y Combinator, Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga “GB” Agboola and Mono CEO Abdul Hassan participated.
Duplo will spend the investment on improving its product, tech and sales as well as move into other sectors asides from FMCG retail to businesses in travel, farming, B2B marketplaces, alcohol and beverages.
Founded by Yele Oyekola and Tunde Akinnuwa in September 2021, Duplo enables businesses across Africa to simplify their payment flows. Distributors can create unique virtual accounts for retailers and agents to make real-time payments or bank transfers, while the platform helps to reconcile their books automatically.
Duplo charges a 1% fee for every transaction performed on its platform. And depending on their size, businesses also pay between ₦100 (~$0.20) to ₦1,000 (~$2.00) to create virtual accounts.
Besides providing tools that enable B2B companies to digitize their payment flows, there’s a no-code tool for them to optimise trade with their business customers, vendors and suppliers.
The platform also helps these companies to generate or pay invoices, offer credit to their business customers and a dashboard to attribute payment flows to a particular customer, retailer or location.
The company, which launched its pilot three months ago, said customers reported cost savings of more than 12% within that period. Duplo has also grown 60% month-month to serve 20+ enterprise businesses. Currently, it has processed over $380,000; however, Duplo has plans to reach $40 million in annualized TPV by the end of Q2, said the CEO.
“We’re excited to support Yele, Tunde, Emeka and the rest of the team at Duplo as they look to build a scalable B2B payments platform for the African market,” said Peter Oriaifo, principal at Oui Capital said in a statement.
“We believe that with the proliferation of commerce in Africa, there’s an emerging need for solutions such as Duplo’s that help abstract away complexities around payments.”
“There’s just a tonne of potential opportunity for us as a business that we can tap into very soon,” said Oyekola.
“And while we’re currently focusing on the retail space over the next three months, we’re speaking to businesses in other sectors also to help them automate their entire payments through our APIs.”
