Startups in Nigeria like Prospa are taking action to help get more businesses running.
As the fintech startup aims to provide small businesses with banking and software services, it has closed a $3.8 million pre-seed round which will help them achieve their mission.
TechCrunch reports that Prospa — who especially caters to freelancers and entrepreneurs that typically have less access to resources for their businesses — just raised “the largest round of its kind in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa at the moment.”
The founding team behind Prospa are Frederik Obasi, Chioma Ugo and Rodney Jackson-Cole. The trio started building Prospa between June and September 2019. According to TechCrunch, the team launched their startup in the act to “cheaply solve the needs of these small business owners in banking and software.”
“There’s a massive startup ecosystem in the U.S. where you can basically grow a billion-dollar company just serving YC companies,” Obasi told TechCrunch. “We don’t have that here. We’re really building for the backbone of the economy, which is small and micro-businesses.”
The company not only offers banking services, but also invoicing tools, inventory management, employee and vendor management, an e-commerce store, and payroll features.
“Banking is just a little part of what we do,” Obasi said. “We know we’re put into the neobank category, but we see our product as 10% banking and 90% software. So the experience is very much different from what you’d get from a neobank and the use case for Prospa users is quite different.”
According to Obasi, Prospa has “tens of thousands of businesses and is growing 35% month-on-month.”
As the company continues to develop and grow its following, Prospa envisions being in the game for the long haul and plans to use its pre-seed investment to assist more customers and hire more talent for their banking and software services.
