Nigeria: TLcom leads Pastel's $5.5m seed round
Nigerian business management solution provider Pastel has closed a $5.5 million seed funding round, led by TLcom Capital, with participation from other venture capital firms like GFC, Golden Palm, DFS Labs, Ulu Ventures, Plug and Play, Soma Cap and other Silicon Valley investors.
Pastel started as a group of Stanford graduate students using design thinking strategies to create solutions that African business owners are willing to pay for. The company’s founders met in graduate school at Stanford University in California and quickly bonded over their passion to solve pain points for African businesses as they go about their day to day activities. This passion birthed the Sabi bookkeeping app, the company’s flagship product.
The founders started by creating the Sabi app to ease bookkeeping and customer management, then created Quick Receipt for simple invoicing and receipts and are now leveraging local saving groups to provide financing for the businesses on its platform.
The new funding will enable Pastel to expand its product offerings. The company is working on developing more productivity and finance management features and tools around group savings, loans and payments that will help SMEs scale as well as ease their day to day activities.
The Sabi bookkeeping and customer relationship management product has over 45,000 active users while Quick Receipt, the invoicing and receipts app, has more than 60,000 active users.
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