Brazil's Nubank has led a $250 million investment round in Tyme Group, a digital bank with operations in South Africa and the Philippines.
Tyme Group is head-quartered in Singapore with 15 million customers in Africa and South-East Asia. The Series D investment round comes after Tyme reached its first months of profitability at the start of the year and gives the five-year old digital-only bank a $1.5 billion unicorn valuation.
Nubank invested US$150 million, M&G’s Catalyst $50 million and existing shareholders a further $50 million.
Coen Jonker, co-founder and CEO of Tyme Group, comments: “Nubank transformed financial services in Brazil. We are excited by the value that Nubank’s thought partnership and advice can bring to Tyme particularly in areas such as data analytics, credit risk management, product development and marketing - levers we believe are key to achieving leadership in our markets."
David Vélez, founder and CEO of Nubank, believes that the future of financial services globally is of digitally-native companies.
"We have met dozens of teams across different geographies, and we think that Tyme Group is extremely well-positioned to be a digital bank leader in Africa and Southeast Asia," he says. "We are excited to work with Tyme to share many of our learnings of scaling this model to hundreds of millions of customers.”
Nubank has been a runaway success story in Brazil, recently surpassing 100 million customers on its home turf, capturing 57% of the adult population in the country. The achievement came on the heels of record 2023 financial results, with over US$1 billion in net profit and over US$8 billion in revenues.