Ghana: Fintech company raises $700,000 seed funding
OZÉ, a Ghana-based fintech startup focused on helping African small businesses grow by digitising their operations and providing them with access to affordable capital, closed a $700,000 seed round last week. In this round, venture funds like Anorak Ventures and Matuca Sarl, and angel groups like Nigeria’s Rising Tide Africa joined existing investors Ingressive Capital and MEST. The company will use the funding to grow its team, expand to Nigeria, and promote the newly launched iOS version of its business app.
In Ghana and across sub-Saharan Africa, many small businesses can’t access capital. In fact, the MSME credit gap in sub-Saharan Africa is $331 billion. That means African lenders are missing out on up to $80 billion in annual interest income. Why? Because lending to MSMEs is hard. Many are still keeping records on paper, have no formal business education, no credit history, weak or no collateral, and/or opaque operations. OZÉ solves this problem. Its award-winning business app and proprietary credit risk algorithm make it profitable for banks to make no-collateral loans to MSMEs.
“The OZÉ Flywheel makes profitable lending to MSMEs possible for banks,” says co-founder and CEO, Meghan McCormick. “Using OZÉ already screens for the type of entrepreneurs banks should want to lend to and as entrepreneurs keep using OZÉ they can access more funds at a lower risk to the bank.”
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