Kenyan Startup Alvin secures $740k Pre-seed Funding Round

Alvin is a Kenyan-based smart money manager app that uses personalized offers, automated budgeting and applied behavioral game design strategies to help people with aligning their daily spending with and around their saving goals in a sustainable way.

Ahead of its public unveiling, the startup had an intentional soft launch of its flagship product, the Alvin App v1 Labrador public beta.

It ended last year securing an oversubscribed US$740,000 pre-seed funding round.

The funding round was led by Ingressive Capital, with participation from other investors like Voltron Capital, Zephyr Acorn, Tahseen Consulting, Future Africa.

Other notable investors included Paystack CEO Shola Akinlade, former CEO of marketing company Dondé. US-based B2B SaaS-focused accelerator programme also invested up to US$100,000 from

In a statement, Alvin’s CEO Winston Reid stated that he and his co-founders launched the startup to solve a problem they were coming across on a regular basis.

He said, “the personal finance apps we found in Kenya weren’t optimised for the local context, offered no assistance with acquiring the assets we wanted to save toward. It didn’t offer daily support to save for required goals as it only highlighted the ability to save.”

He added that in order for anyone to cultivate sustainable saving habits, they need to have tenable habits. More than reminding people to make deposits, this requires giving people more support.

“Labrador”, the first version of the Alvin app is currently in private beta. It features the ability to create a budget in just two minutes and also creates an automated expense tracking for M-Pesa, showing users the amount they can spend on things like rent for each month based on their income, groceries, entertainment and most importantly, savings goal.

While the Alvin app is set to launch publicly in Kenya in the next few months, the startup has international ambitions already.

“Having onboard powerhouses like Ingressive Capital, Voltron Capital, Shola Akinlade, and Future Africa, we have plans to expand to immediately to Nigeria in the latter half of 2022,” Reid said.

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