Nigerian agency banking startup CrowdForce secures $3.6m in pre Series A round

CrowdForce, a Y Combinator-backed agency banking platform based in Nigeria, has raised a US$3.6 million pre-Series A funding round to triple its PayForce agent network this year in order to expand its financial service offerings to underserved Nigerian communities.

CrowdForce was born in 2018 as a result of a pivot and rebranding by Oluwatomi Ayorinde and Damilola Ayorinde, who founded Mobile Forms in 2015 as a data analytics platform that provided insights on hard-to-reach rural and semi-peri urban populations.

The startup has created a financial services distribution platform that can instantly transform any merchant into a mobile bank branch. The platform employs data analytics to create financial service products that truly address financial inclusion. Its PayForce product is a PoS-enabled system that offers ATM, transfer, and bill payment services.

Aruwa Capital Management led the US$3.6 million pre-Series A round, which included both equity and debt. HAVAC and AAIC also participated. CrowdForce plans to use the funds to grow its team, geographical operations, and marketing efforts in order to expand its agent network. This year, CrowdForce hopes to triple its active agent base to 7,000.

It also intends to distribute more point-of-sale terminals to small businesses, such as gas stations, pharmacies, and aggregators/resellers, to serve as mobile bank branches. Since 2020, CrowdForce has been cash positive and has served 1.9 million unique customers across 25 Nigerian states.

“In Africa, fintechs and challenger banks are emerging to provide better financial services via digital rails.” It’s a fantastic market development, but cash is clearly still king in Nigeria. 97 percent of retail transactions take place offline. There is a clear need to build an offline distribution network to enable fintechs and challengers to reach the mass market – this is exactly what we’re doing at CrowdForce, and this round will accelerate our momentum even further,” said CrowdForce CEO and co-founder Oluwatomi Ayorinde.

“We are ecstatic to be leading this investment in CrowdForce.” We see significant value in the product because it solves a real problem by providing access to critical financial services in rural areas that traditional financial institutions have overlooked. CrowdForce is actively deepening financial inclusion through its products and services, and it has distinct competitive advantages due to its proprietary technology and extensive agent distribution network across the country,” said Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes, Aruwa Capital’s founder and managing partner.