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Nomba is a Nigerian finance business that began in 2017 as an AI chatbot. Kudi.AI, a chatbot that assisted users with online payments, went live. According to TechCabal, the company has developed to a VC-backed corporation with a $150 million valuation.
According to TechCrunch, the company just raised $30 million in a pre-Series B investment to enhance the supply of bespoke payment solutions for African businesses. The fundraising round, headed by San Francisco-based Base, increased the company’s worth to $150 million.
The round also saw participation from Partech and Khosla Ventures, who previously participated in Nomba’s Series A round in 2019. New backers include Helios Digital Ventures and Shopify.
The company wants to use the funding to build custom solutions for different businesses. “Restaurants will be able to access menus, manage inventory, receive payments, and perform other business functions all from the same hardware,” the firm stated.
Adeyinka Adewale and Pelumi Aboluwarin formed Nomba. Because not everyone was tech-savvy enough to download fintech apps to conduct online transactions, the company began as a chatbot.
“We launched in the first week of 2017, and at the time, because a lot of big tech companies were launching natural language processing engines, it was a good time to build an assistant to walk the everyday person through online payments,” CEO Adewale told Techcabal.
Kudi, a simple cash-in, cash-out, and payment and collection POS system, evolved into Nomba, an omnichannel platform with a variety of business and management solutions for many types of businesses. According to Techcrunch, the company has fintech clients such as Moniepoint, OPay, and FairMoney as a result of its acquisition of CrowdForce.
“Our core focus has been figuring out how to help small businesses essentially scale. A lot of that is hinged on what kind of software tools we provide which could potentially reduce their cost of operation and provide better visibility to their business,” Adewale said.
Nomba serves three business segments: agents and unit merchants who run retail businesses with annual transaction revenues of less than $100,000; medium-sized businesses with annual transaction revenues ranging from $100,000 to a million dollars; and enterprise customers with annual transaction revenues exceeding $1 million.
The company handles $1 billion in monthly transactions and has over 300,000 enterprises using at least one Nomba-powered product from the business segments it supports.
