Tiger Global Leads $15M Funding in Nigerian Open Banking Startup Mono

Open banking startup Mono raised $15 million led by Tiger Global, with participation from existing investors Entree Capital, Lateral Capital, GPIC, Acuity VC and Ingressive Capital, and new backers Target Global, General Catalyst and SBI Investment.

Headquartered in Nigeria and co-founded in 2020 by Abdul Hassan, who serves as CEO, and Prakhar Singh, CTO, Mono has raised $17.6 million to date.

“We wanted to build an app that could manage all our financial accounts in one place, but we couldn’t find an infrastructure to support our use case and Plaid wasn’t available in Africa, so we decided to build the Plaid for Africa, ourselves,” Hassan said in a blog post on Monday (Oct. 11).

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Mono’s open banking technology enables businesses and individuals to gain access to financial information stored at commercial banks. While open banking is largely focused on giving third parties access to retail banking data, Mono strives to enable people to extend access to all digital financial accounts they have.

“With the digitization that’s happening in commerce across Africa, we believe this is the right time for an Open Banking platform to open up the financial data stored by the banks,” Hassan said.

Mono Connect, the startup’s first product, launched in 2020 and gives users the ability to securely link financial accounts and share income, banking, and identity data. The company works with more than 200 customers and partners including Flutterwave, Renmoney, Aella, Credpal, Lendsqr, Float, Payhippo and others.

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The company has so far delivered in excess of 200 million units of financial data to Mono partners, per the blog post.

Mono will use the fresh infusion of capital to grow its workforce beyond the 30 people who have helped the company become what it is today. With a larger pool of talent, Mono aims to help businesses and developers across Africa tap the benefits of open banking.

In addition, the new funding will help the startup branch out to new companies and scale product development while also doubling its connection coverage. Mono is also planning to launch its bank-to-bank payment product in Nigeria before 2021 closes.