SoftBank Invests in African Lending Analytics Startup Credrails

Credrails, a startup working on aggregating financial data in Africa, is set to close its $2.5 million funding round this month with backing from SoftBank, Bloomberg reported Monday (Feb. 21).

Co-founder Clara Wanjiku Odero said the company was working with several customers in Kenya and Nigeria. Credrails offers services like lending analytics and reconciliation, and it plans to offer its services to more people, rather than staying in what Odero termed “stealth mode.”

“We are building the open banking infrastructure for Africa, we want to connect banks, mobile money, offline data into a single application programming interface that we then expose to businesses for other use cases,” she said in an interview this month, per Bloomberg. “We’ve been building it up quietly with a core set of customers to make sure that everything works.”

Wanjiku Odero said there was a need for “contextualize” the data for banks, lending and payment companies which could profit from stitching together financial data — improving the lack of banking infrastructure.

She said the aim was to “tell them about their customers ability to pay whatever expenses they have, how much they can afford to borrow and so on.”

Credrails has other backers besides SoftBank — Unicorn Growth Capital and Samos Investments Advisory are among them, and both took an equity stake in the company.

SoftBank is funding it through the Vision Fund Emerge Program, and said the fund is “an investment accelerator that promotes diversity in tech by partnering under represented founders with the capital, tools and network they need to scale their businesses.”

SoftBank also reportedly invested in ElasticRun, a kirana commerce program helping rural India get more connected with businesses, PYMNTS wrote.

Related: ElasticRun Set to Raise $300M in SoftBank-Led Round

ElasticRun was expected to raise $300 million in the SoftBank-led round, according to the report.

Sources said SoftBank was planning to invest around $200 million, with additional funding coming from companies like Goldman Sachs and existing investor Prosus.