Octopus Ventures leads fintech company's $15m funding round
African financial data platform Pngme has raised a further $15 million in series A funding led by Octopus Ventures, a $1.7 billion venture capital fund based in London. This funding comes less than a year after a $3 million seed round.
Octopus Ventures are joined by Lateral Capital, Unshackled Ventures, Raptor Group, EchoVC, Future Africa, Aruwa Capital Management Two Small Fish Ventures, the 51 and a talented group of individual angel investors including RallyCap’s Hayden Simmons, Plaid’s Dan Khan, former COO of RBC Capital Markets Richard Talbot, Creative Destruction Lab mentors, and Intersect VC’s Kyle Ellicott among others.
Pngme enables access to finance for everyone by providing mission-critical data infrastructure and machine learning models for the next generation of financial services.
The company will use the funding to expand the executive team with the hiring of Lorraine Kageni Maina as chief strategy officer and Nick Masson as chief technology officer. Alongside key executive hires, Pngme is expanding its data science, engineering, product, and sales teams globally to meet the demand for integrations across large enterprise banks, credit bureaus, MFBs, fintechs, and neo banks.
“With the demand we are seeing in our core markets and from financial institutions globally, it is clear we are solving a major pain point by building financial data infrastructure and machine learning-as-a-service. With this fresh injection of capital we are not only scaling up our data processing and machine learning capabilities but also building a robust team that can deliver on our mission of financial inclusion,” says Brendan Playford, CEO of Pngme.
Octopus Ventures invests in technology leaders across health, fintech, consumer and B2B software with a focus on companies committed to pioneering the future of efficient transactions and inclusive technology. The firm’s fintech portfolio includes: cazoo, sprout.ai, semafone and digital shadows among others. WeFarm is the firm’s second Africa-based investment.
“Pngme’s infrastructure has processed billions of data points from hundreds of financial institutions across sub-Saharan Africa and we plan to double down on our Insights Library and expand our third-party data connections to other markets over the next year,” says Cate Rung, COO of Pngme.
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