African fintech PNGme has just announced a $15 million funding round led by London-based investment fund Octopus Ventures. This funding comes less than a year after a first round of financing that resulted in the raising of three million dollars. With this money, the company announces the mobilization of a new round that will be used to fund its expansion in Africa and expand its teams by recruiting experts.

PNGme, an African fintech that leverages AI to facilitate the collection and analysis of banking data

PNGme is a US-based fintech with a presence in Nigeria as well as Kenya. It is developing a financial data infrastructure as well as a machine learning platform to provide quality tools for the next generation of financial services. The company founded in 2018 by Brendan Playford and Cate Rung aims to facilitate the data collection and analysis process for financial institutions, banks and credit bureaus it serves.

The startup announced that it has just closed a Series 1 funding round led by Octopus Ventures, a London-based venture capital firm. A funding of $15 million has been secured by the firm. Brendan Playford, CEO of PNGme, discusses this fundraising while stating the company’s future challenges:

“With the demand we’re seeing in our core markets and from financial institutions around the world, it’s clear that we’re solving a major problem by creating financial data infrastructure and machine learning as a service. With this new injection of capital, we are not only expanding our data processing and machine learning capabilities, but also building a strong team that can deliver on our financial inclusion mission.”

Expand PNGme’s teams and continue the firm’s expansion in Africa

The fundraising will be used to expand the company’s management team with the hiring of Lorraine Kageni Maina as chief strategy officer and Nick Masson as chief technology officer. The former is very familiar with the banking, consumer and technology industries, while the latter previously led large engineering teams at WeWork. Each will bring their skills to the table with the aim of taking fintech to the next level.

At the same time, PNGme is looking to expand its data science, engineering, product and sales teams globally to meet the demand for integration across large corporate banks, credit bureaus, MFBs, fintechs and neo-banks. These arrivals come to fulfill one of the company’s main objectives: to continue its expansion on the African continent and more specifically in Sub-Saharan Africa.

To conclude, Cate Rung, COO of PNGme, outlines the brand’s future ambition:

“PNGme’s infrastructure has processed billions of data points from hundreds of financial institutions across sub-Saharan Africa and we plan to double our Insights library and expand our third-party data connections to other markets over the next year.”

Translated from Afrique : la fintech Pngme lève 15 millions de dollars afin de poursuivre son développement sur le continent africain