Kuda Bank has raised a Series B funding of $55 million at a valuation of $500 million. The funding was secured via its London entity and comes on the back of some impressive early growth for the startup.
This latest Series B was a relatively quick inside round since it’s coming from existing investors. The series B funding was co-led by Valar Ventures and Target Global with previous angel investors like SBI and a host of others also participating.
Valar Venture’s co partner, Andrew McCormack, said that he was really impressed with Kuda’s approach to the still-nascent potential of the market and that was what informed their decision invest in the startup.
“Kuda is our first investment in Africa and our initial confidence in the team has been upheld by its rapid growth in the past four months,” Andrew said. “With a youthful population eager to adopt digital financial services in the region, we believe that Kuda’s transformative effect on banking will scale across Africa and we’re proud to continue supporting them.”
“We felt that Babs and Musty” — Musty Mustapha, the co-founder and CTO — “are ambitious on another level. For them, it was always about building a pan-African bank, not just a Nigerian leader,” said Ricardo Schäfer, the partner at Target who led the round for the firm. “The prospect of banking over 1 billion people from day one really stood out for me at the beginning.”
Kuda Bank’s main objective is to build a new take on banking services for “every African on the planet.” According to the co-founder and CEO Babs Ogundeyi, the funding will be used to double down on new services in Nigeria and also prepare its launch into more countries on the continent.
Kuda now has about 1.5 million registered users, which is more than double the amount it had in March when it around 700,000 registered users – a statistic it shared when announcing its Series A of $25 million led by Valar Ventures.
Speaking to TechCrunch at a recent interview, Kuda Bank’s CEO, Ogundeyi, said: “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 Bank.”
The CEO further said that “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.”
According to TechCrunch, Ogundeyi wouldn’t reveal the countries Kuda Bank would be targeting next, but he did note that its most recently-launched product, Kuda’s first move into credit by way of an overdraft allowance, is a sign of the great things ahead.
