In the first part of this article series, GNB News introduced you to few high-flying tech startups shaping  the tech space in Nigeria. In this piece, therefore, we will be following in the same trail as we consider more companies in this terrain

Aella Credit

Aella Credit is an online platform  that provides instant credit facility to salaried employees and individuals. It is a one-stop app for all forms of financial needs. Aella makes it super easy for anyone to readily borrow, invest, and make payments. The company offers personal loans ranging from N100,000 to N1,000,000 for up to 12 months. It underwrites loans with a proprietary algorithm focused on the Nigerian market and integrated with the credit bureaus.

The fast-rising tech firm understands that lack of access to credit and financial services are the main impediment to MSME growth and poverty reduction in several emerging economies”, said the company’s CEO. Thus, it believes it can achieve an extensive coverage of the entire continent  through commitment to provision of trustworthy credit which will in turn improve financial inclusion. The move will equally enable MSME expansion and accelerating economic growth and this raise will allow them to scale their expansion

In February 2010, Aella secured a $10 million debt financing round from a Singaporean company – HQ Financial Group. the new capital raise was to facilitate the credit company’s effort at providing financial inclusion for most unbanked persons across Nigeria, West Africa, and other emerging markets.

This was Aella Credit’s second capital raise. The first round of fundraising was in 2017 when the fintech company raised an undisclosed amount from various investors, including American seed accelerator – Y Combinator.

Helium Health

Helium Health is an e-health startup based in Lagos, Nigeria, established in 2016. The company makes hospitals and clinics instantly digital with its flagship product Electronic Medical Records / Hospital Management Information System (EMR/HMIS), the most commonly used solution of this kind in West Africa

The Health Start-up  was founded to help bridge the gap in the healthcare space in Sub Saharan Africa and beyond.  In essence, the absence of concrete data on healthcare largely due to the seeming ”preference” for paper records. The company believes paper records are cumbersome and they make hospitals and clinics prone to medical errors, increase the patient’s wait time and reduce the overall efficiency of the healthcare practice from administrative and clinical points of view.

Thus, Helium Health emerged to equip healthcare providers with a comprehensive suite of technology solutions dedicated to managing every aspect of healthcare delivery, from electronic medical records and telemedicine, to administration and financial management. The startup has become the leading provider of full-service technology solutions for healthcare stakeholders in Africa. In April 2020, it raised a $10 million Series A round funding to extend its presence in global markets and push into new ones. Global Ventures and Africa Healthcare Master fund (AAIC) co-led the investment round.

Helium planned to use the funding round to hire and expand to North and East Africa, including Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Morocco.

Kuda Bank

The idea that a bank can be wholly digital is unrelatable and unremarkable to most Africans for two reasons led to the emergence of Kuda Bank, a startup that provides a full banking service on smartphones. It is a known fact  that About 66% of African adults are not banked. This is especially common place in Nigeria where even customer service contract staff  of commercial banks often request certain credentials the user may not have.

It is equally an established fact that 95% of all transactions in Africa are in cash. Thus. the quest to salvage this situation, making banking services accessible to  every bankable African sits at the thrust of Kuda Banks objectives.- They literally plan to bank every African on the planet. Kuda plans for unparalleled customer service delivery and this is why they are constantly reworking the Kuda Bank App for maximum efficiency in this direction.  To their credit, the transaction metrics show that Kuda Bank are well underway to achieve its set objectives

In February, the bank reported $2.2bn in transactions processed. This includes inflows and outflows, airtime purchases, and all other user transactions. When a user receives a $30 deposit and immediately makes a $30 transfer to another user, Kuda records the total transactions processed within that period as $60.

The Kuda App is truly a consumer-focused, digital bank that is poised to pattern itself to follow model in Europe, the US and China. The fintech company secured a US$10 million seed round in November 2020 – the biggest seed round ever to be raised in Africa, led by Target Global with participation from Entrée Capital and SBI Investment.

It planned to use the funding to help accelerate its growth plans and keep up with customer demand. Specifically, it now uses its funds for key hires, product development, and to expand operations across Africa.