An ongoing pre-Series A round of investment is being raised by Kenyan agency banking as a service provider Tanda in order to hasten product development and client acquisition in Kenya and elsewhere.
In addition to giving store owners access to products on credit, Tanda enables them to serve as their clients’ access points for services including airtime, utility payments, banking, and insurance.
The platform combines all significant financial service providers, enabling agents to offer a variety of digital items while also delivering necessary commodities to stores. It provides its agents with unsecured credit as well.
More than 30,000 enterprises, 800,000 consumers, and more than 100 developers, including Twiga Foods and Bento, have benefited from the company’s services over the course of the last four years.
The latest investment, which followed a seed round at the beginning of last year, comes from DFS Lab in addition to three additional investors, including HAVAC, a current investor. Over the next 15 months, Tanda will utilize the financing to grow in Kenya and East Africa, invest in important strategic partners and accelerate product development.
In order to better represent its expanding product portfolio, Tanda is also launching a new brand identity. This includes Tanda Trader, an app for businesses to accept payments, sell digital goods, and access financing; Tanda Pocket, a virtual wallet with digital cards to spend, track finances, and budget; and Tanda I/O, an API library that makes it easier for companies to collect and distribute payments across agents, mobile networks, and utility service providers.
“Our new products and growing distribution will open up opportunities for Tanda and our ecosystem partners to continue solving challenges for the majority of Africans locked out of the formal financial services ecosystem. We also look forward to deepening our customer relationships and growing into new and exciting African markets,” said Tanda founder and CEO Geoffrey Mulei.
“Tanda is a huge win for tech companies in Africa,” said Rob Heath, partner at HAVAÍC. “With no access to financial services, people and merchants in Africa deal almost exclusively in cash. Tanda’s tech enables them to pay and receive cash in exchange for digital services that would otherwise have been out of reach. We are so pleased our journey with Tanda continues. And we cannot wait to see what the future holds.”
