US-Based FinTech Pngme Raises $15M To Expand Services Across Africa

Financial data infrastructure and machine learning-as-a-service platform Pngme has raised $15 million in Series A funding, the company said in a Tuesday (Aug. 24) announcement.

The Africa-focused, U.S.-based firm plans to use the funds to expand its global executive team with the hiring of Lorraine Kageni Maina as chief strategy officer and Nick Masson as chief technology officer. The FinTech company will also add new members to its data science, engineering, product and sales teams around the world.

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The financing round was led by London-based venture capital firm Octopus Ventures and drew participation from Lateral Capital, Unshackled Ventures, Raptor Group, EchoVC, Future Africa and Two Small Fish Ventures. A group of individual angel investors also backed the round, including Rally Cap Venture’s Hayden Simmons, Plaid’s Dan Khan and Intersect VC’s Kyle Ellicott.

“With this fresh injection of capital, we are not only scaling up our data processing and machine learning capabilities, but also building a robust team that can deliver on our mission of financial inclusion,” Pngme CEO Brendan Playford said in the statement.

Pngme COO Cate Rung further added that the company’s “infrastructure has processed billions of data points from hundreds of financial institutions across sub-Saharan Africa, and we plan to double down on our Insights Library and expand our third-party data connections to other markets over the next year.”

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Pngme’s new round comes six months after the San Francisco-based company raised $3 million in seed funding to expand its business across Sub-Saharan Africa. The company, which launched in 2018, started out as a lending platform before shifting to a data infrastructure platform helping banks and FIs aggregate users’ financial data through one unified API.