$1 M Pre-seed funding raised by Nigerian banking-as-a-service startup Anchor
Nigeria’s Anchor has secured over US $1 million in pre-seed investment and announced the opening of its public beta. Anchor is a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform that enables the seamless development of financial products across Africa.
Olamide Sobowale, Segun Adeyemi, and Gbekeloluwa Olufotebi founded Anchor, which offers APIs for offering accounts, money movement, savings, and card goods. Segun Adeyemi was the former CEO of Amplifypay.
Starting in its first market, Nigeria, the startup’s recently released public beta API architecture makes it simpler for African firms to design, embed, and launch financial solutions.
“We built Anchor to abstract away the complexities in building financial products, so businesses can get started in five minutes with a few lines of code,” said Adeyemi.
The firm, which is presently a member of the Y Combinator S22 batch, has already amassed pre-seed capital totaling more than US $1 million to support the expansion of its product. Along with Byld Ventures, Luno Expeditions, Niche Capital, Mountain Peak Capital, and a number of angel investors including Emmanuel Okeleji, Ado Oseragbaje, Yinka Odeleye, and Sanmi Famuyide, YC is one of the investors.
Since its May beta debut, Anchor’s BaaS platform has processed millions of dollars in transactions, increasing by over 200% month over month. Now it is opening its public beta to help African businesses integrate finance into their goods and help FinTech create banking solutions. The firm already has over 40 other startups in its queue.
“We have seen first-hand the painful process of closing banking partnerships, negotiating third-party contracts, and obtaining regulatory approvals. And more generally, the extensive time and effort required to launch financial products,” said Adeyemi.
“Considering the similarity in the underlying infrastructure, irrespective of the unique value propositions, companies should not have to wait for years and spend millions to go to market. That’s why we are excited to get Anchor into the hands of many more businesses via our public beta launch.”
A partner at Y Combinator named Ashutosh Desai expressed his excitement to support Anchor’s team in creating the financial infrastructure required for the continent of Africa’s economic development.
“Anchor’s embedded finance platform enables technology companies in Africa to build products that can rapidly expand access and improve quality of financial services,” he said.
Youcef Oudjidane, the founder of Byld Ventures, stated his opinion that BaaS will be crucial to the dissemination of financial services throughout Africa.
“As a full stack BaaS provider, Anchor demarcates customer engagement from infrastructure – enabling its customers to focus on building differentiation as opposed to commodity infrastructure. We are really excited to be working with this determined and experienced team,” he said.
