Ghana’s Fido Secures $30M in Series A Round to Launch New Products and Facilitate Pan-African Expansion
Fido, a fintech company with headquarters in Ghana, has raised $30 million in a Series A round of fundraising with the goal of expanding throughout Africa.
Since 2015, the fintech has provided credit to thousands of consumers via their mobile devices. This year, it plans to expand to Uganda and other parts of the continent by adding savings and payment products to its lineup.
In addition to its Israel office, the fintech is planning to construct a second research and development facility in Ghana’s capital city of Accra. By automating most of its activities, this facility would help the fintech secure long-term viability.
According to Fido CEO Alon Eitan, a portion of consumers, who are primarily small business owners, don’t really have access to traditional banking systems. and we see a chance to provide these customers, who do not use banking systems, with totally digital savings solutions that are very simple to use.
The company just raised $30 million in equity funding and an undisclosed amount in debt finance in a Series A round led by Israel-based private equity fund Fortissimo Capital, with participation from Harvard alumnus-led venture capital fund Yard Ventures. With this, $38 million has now been raised in equity investments overall.
Customers will be able to deposit using cards, cash, and even mobile money, and we will obtain lucrative returns on their funds. In order to achieve interoperability between all the many payment rails that are currently emerging in various nations, our payments product will be placed on top of already-existing payment rails, according to Eitan.
Fido, which was founded by Nadav Topolski, Tomer Edry, and Nir Zepkowitz, provides mobile loans up to $250 to individuals and small businesses. These loans are repayable by a single payment or a series of payments over a maximum six-month period.
Eitan claims that since digital registration for a Fido account just takes ten minutes, customers may easily set one up.
Customers must upload copies of their identity cards and headshots in order to register. These documents are verified by Fido’s image recognition model and cross-referenced against databases. According to Eitan, the multiple-step authentication stops fraud.
He continued by saying that the fintech uses credit-scoring tools to decide how much money it may offer to potential borrowers.
“With the help of really intelligent machine learning models, we were able to solve default rates. And I could say, modestly, that our results are the best on the continent. Our default rates are in the low single digits, which is, in my opinion, unheard of in our industry. We are able to bring new machine learning models into orbit thanks to our unwavering commitment on doing so. We presently run more than three models solely for risk, and we’ll be releasing a fourth one soon. We have models for fraud as well,” he added.
According to Eitan, the fintech has so far approved 340,000 Ghanaian customers for 1.5 million loans totaling $150 million. As it expands into additional African markets, beginning with Uganda, this sum is expected to rise.
“Ghana and Uganda are similar in many aspects, and we are extremely familiar with the rules. In our opinion, the market is very large in terms of both the population and the use of mobile devices. There are approximately nine million mobile accounts in Uganda, so it’s crucial for us to enter a developed market because it enables us to rapidly deploy our services, which is what we truly want to achieve, he said.
