Kuda Bank, the London-based, Nigerian-operating startup has grown to be one of Nigeria’s foremost mobile-first, personalised and often cheaper set of banking services built on newer, API-based infrastructure, has seen immense a growth in the last several months, and to fuel its current growth trajectory, the fintech platform has decided to raise another round of funding.
According to TechCrunch Kuda bank confirmed that the startup has closed, via its London entity, a Series B of $55 million — money that it plans to use to double down not just on new services for Nigeria, but to prepare its launch into more countries on the continent, and in the words of co-founder and CEO Babs Ogundeyi, to build a new take on banking services for “ever African on the planet.” The funding was made at a valuation of $500 million, and it comes on the back of some impressive early growth for the startup.
We’ve been doing a lot of resource deployment has been in our operational entity, in Nigeria. But now we are doubling down on expansion and the idea is to build a strong team for the expansion plans for Kuda. We still see Nigeria as an important market and don’t want to be distracted so don’t want to disrupt those operations too much. It’s a strong market and competitive. It’s one that we feel we need to have a strong hold on. So this funding is to invest in expansion and have more experience in the company with relation to expansion.
Ogundeyi told TechCrunch in an interview.
Kuda now has 1.4 million registered users, which is more than double the number it had in March when it had 650,000 registered users — a figure it revealed when announcing its Series A of $25 million led by Valar Ventures.
“Kuda is unique among the neobanks in that it is building its services with its own banking license in hand. This means that it can be more flexible and fast-moving when it comes to creating new products or tweaking existing ones, and it gives the company another level of credibility in a region where those who were already banking with incumbents might be more wary of new players.”
