Kenyan open finance infrastructure startup Credrails has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding as it works towards connecting the whole of Africa to its API.
Launched in 2020, Credrails is building the open finance rails for Africa, connecting bank, mobile money and offline data into a single API that it then exposes to other businesses to build a variety of use cases, such as lending analytics, KYC and KYB.
This API connected every African country, allowing developers to build for Africa with ease and quickly. The startup already has physical operations in Nigeria, and has access to 250 million accounts in 33 countries. It is working towards connecting all of Africa, a goal boosted by an undisclosed amount of seed funding secured last month. Investors include SoftBank and Unicorn Growth, as well as Samos Ventures and Precursor.
“The future of financial services rests on developers’ ability to build revolutionary products whilst rapidly improving existing offerings. Credrails enables these with open and robust access to rich data sources. Credrails solutions also promote interoperability across services, leading to faster and more affordable movement of money around Africa and beyond,” Clara Odero, the startup’s CEO and co-founder, told Disrupt Africa.
“Credrails exists to make it easier to access the entire African market, versus the top four or five markets on the continent, by connecting each country’s financial services into a single API.”
Credrails has seen 400 per cent month-on-month growth since it launched in August 2020, and plans to be active in five markets by the end of 2022.
“We are getting a lot of requests from customers as well from across markets, and we are using that to plan our growth,” Odero said.
