Pastel, Nigerian Startup Secures a $5.5 million Seed for Expansion
Pastel, a Nigerian startup, has raised $5.5 million in seed funding in order to expand its product offerings.
The round was led by TLcom Capital. Global Founders Capital (GFC), Golden Palm Investments, DFS Labs, Ulu Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, and Soma Capital are among the other investors.
Abuzar Royesh, Olamide Oladeji, and Izunna Okonkwo founded Pastel, formerly Sabi Cash, in 2021. It is a Nigerian bookkeeping and digital platform for merchants that assists small businesses in digitizing processes and saving money.
Unlike similar platforms, Pastel took a different approach, creating standalone products such as Quick Receipt and Pastel Financing rather than combining several features into a single app.
Sabi, Pastel’s flagship product, is a digital bookkeeping app that allows small businesses to monitor and manage their transactions and customers, gain insights into their cash flows, issue receipts, and manage customers who owe them effectively.
The Quick Receipt app, which has over 60,000 active merchant users, provides businesses with simple invoicing and receipt tools.
The Swift Money app, on the other hand, provides business financing through local Nigerian saving groups known as ajo.
Ajo, also known as esusu, is a popular Nigerian financial scheme in which a group of people contributes money to a leader who keeps the money on their behalf at varying intervals.
As a result, the platform collaborates with established ajo leaders and their organizations. Pastel’s goal is not to replace these leaders, but rather to provide them with tools to better track the well-being and financing of their groups’ members.
The company has only recently started to generate revenue by charging interest and a small fee on these loans; it also has access to savings from its ajo groups to use as a float for loan financing.
Pastel users can sign up for any of the apps and use the same login to access all of the company’s other solutions. By December 2021, the startup claims to have signed up over 100,000 merchants.
The funds will also be used to develop more small business productivity and finance management features and tools, such as group savings, loans, and payments.
