Kenyan agency banking as a service provider Tanda is now soliciting money through a pre-Series A round of fundraising. This seed is to speed up product development and client acquisition in Kenya and elsewhere.
Tanda, which was established in 2018, enables store owners to access inventory on credit and serve as their clients’ access points for services including airtime, utility payments, banking, and insurance.
The platform brings together all the key financial service providers, enabling agents to sell a variety of digital commodities while also supplying retailers with necessities. Additionally, it offers its agents unsecured credit.
The startup has supported more than 30,000 businesses, 800,000 customers, and more than 100 developers over the last four years, including Twiga Foods and Bento, processing over four million transactions in total.
The latest investment, which comes after a seed round at the beginning of the year, is made by HAVAC, an existing investor, along with three other investors, including DFS Lab.
Over the next 15 months, Tanda will use the funds to scale in Kenya and East Africa, expedite product development, and invest in key strategic partners.
Tanda is also launching a new brand identity to best reflect its expanding product portfolio, which includes Tanda I/O, an API library that makes it easier for companies to collect and distribute payments across agents, mobile networks, and utility service providers, Tanda Pocket, a virtual wallet with digital cards for spending, tracking finances, and budgeting, and Tanda Trader, an app for businesses to receive payment, sell digital products, and access financing.
Geoffrey Mulei, the founder and CEO of Tanda, said that the company and its ecosystem partners will have more chances as a result of the new products and expanding distribution to continue addressing problems for the vast majority of Africans excluded from the formal financial services ecosystem.
The startup also looks forward to expanding into new, exciting African markets and strengthening its relationships with its customers.
Tanda is a significant victory for tech firms in Africa, according to Rob Heath, a partner at HAVAC. People and businesses in Africa nearly entirely conduct transactions in cash because they lack access to banking services.
They can now trade cash for digital services that would otherwise be out of their grasp thanks to Tanda’s technology. We are overjoyed that our journey with Tanda goes on. And we are eager to see what lies ahead.
Techbuild’s Take
Thanks to the advancement of mobile technology, which has had a significant impact on the agency banking model, agency banking has become the new standard for businesses.
Thanks to the increasing functionality of smartphones and the ongoing digitalization of the agent chain, we have witnessed significant streamlining in current years.
Nowadays, an agent can be a point of sale for many financial services, whether in urban or rural settings, with just a smartphone and a mobile application.
In an alternate distribution model known as agency banking, the branch network of typical retail banking is extended by using authorized agents.
The agency banking model encourages financial inclusion by expanding access to more people and places.
The startup focuses on this, and the firm even offers other services to its users. With this funding, Tanda will be able to develop its products more effectively and reach new markets.
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