Kenya’s Pezesha Secures Seed Investment From Consonance Investment Managers
Kenyan fintech startup, Pezesha, has secured investment in the form of seed funding from Consonance Investment Managers. The seed investment is expected to go some way towards helping the micro-lending marketplace expand its operations into parts of Eastern and Western Africa.
Pezesha is looking to carve a niche for itself in the area of making credit facilities available and accessible to borrowers. Its value-chain financial marketplace is designed to financially educate borrowers, as well as walk them through a seamless credit-scoring process which ultimately qualifies them for loans.
With its business model and operational blueprint, the startup appears to have gotten off on the right footing towards becoming one of the first online financial marketplaces to serve up lending, as well as other financial services and products, to a community of stakeholders that encompasses borrowers, lenders, and investors. Thus, bringing about the creation of a shared economy.
The latest injection of capital into Pezesha is coming in the wake of previous funding rounds as the Kenyan startup is reported to have benefitted from a pre-seed investment facilitated by a network of angels in New York, Kenya, and DFS Lab, in 2017. This initial round of funding is believed to have been instrumental in building the startup’s team and platform. The latest investment from Consonance Investment Managers comes as an offshoot of what has been the christened the Consonance Kuramo Special Opportunities Fund I; the first of its kind for the investment firm.
On the back of the recent development, Hilda Moraa, CEO of Pezesha and ex-Founder of Weza Tele; one of the first tech startup exits in Kenya, is quoted as saying: “We are delighted and honoured to have Consonance as strategic partners to support and fuel our mission of achieving meaningful financial inclusion to the 200 million in Sub-Saharan Africa who have been exploited and excluded from the formal financial ladder.”
Earlier this year, Pezesha joined the very first Google Launchpad in Africa; a program that promises as much as USD 3 Mn in equity-free funding, workspace, and access to expatriates from Google, Silicon Valley, and Africa to African startups.
The startup also lays claim to having overseen more than 20 million transactions and connected over 2,000 lenders to thousands of quality borrowers on its platform. With the seed investment, the startup which connects credible borrowers to credit-worthy lenders now seems well-placed in its drive to become one of Africa’s first digital marketplace that offers efficient and convenient lending services, amongst others, to a network of borrowers, lenders, and investors. As at the time of writing this piece, efforts to get the team at Pezesha to comment on the amount of funding received and equity agreements, if any, are yet to yield fruit.
Image Source: Risk Takers
