Pan-African embedded finance Fintech Pezesha has raised a pre-series A investment of $11 Million.
The round was a mix of $6 million equity and $5 million debt. The funding round, which was led by Women’s World Banking Capital Partners II (WWBCP II), will see the company significantly scale operations in its core markets and grow into new markets within Sub Sahara Africa.
Pezesha offers a B2B digital lending infrastructure focused on providing affordable working capital to financially excluded SMEs in Sub-Saharan Africa. This sector is estimated to face a $328 Billion financing gap. Pezesha was founded in 2017 by Hilda Moraa, a 2nd time Fintech entrepreneur who successfully exited her first Fintech business in 2015. Pezesha will use the proceeds of this investment to grow its presence in East Africa and expand its digital lending infrastructure to the West African market.
Headquartered in Kenya, Pezesha has been focused on solving hard infrastructure problems that exclude MSMEs in the “missing middle”. By bridging the MSME information gap and mending fragmented value chains, Pezesha has become a leader in Embedded Finance in Africa, offering productive credit to tech-enabled platforms such as Twiga Foods, Jumia and Marketforce among dozens of others.
Partners integrate seamlessly with Pezesha’s APIs and offer credit among other financial services to their merchant network at the point of sale. Pezesha’s credit scoring APIs act as the engine of a simple but robust process where MSMEs receive real time loan offers to purchase stock and pay later. Pezesha also offers financial literacy courses and debt counseling to MSMEs who do not qualify for loans in order to improve their credit scoring and ensure responsible borrowing as they grow within the Pezesha financial ladder.
In the last 2 years Pezesha has grown the value of its disbursements over 2,000% through disbursement of more than 100,000 loans to MSMEs in Kenya, Uganda, and Ghana.