The Venture Codex

Participated · Equity · Feb 2024

Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Lagos, BFree builds post-loan infrastructure to acquire, assess and recover non-performing loan portfolios across Africa. The company uses machine learning to profile defaulting borrowers, predict repayment capacity and customise engagement through automated bots and self-service portals while avoiding punitive measures such as late fees or blacklisting. To date it reports having handled over $740M of distressed loans and interacting with roughly 6.6 million borrowers, serving more than 30 financial institutions across Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. BFree has shifted from offering SaaS collections tools toward actively buying written-off or delinquent loans and managing recoveries internally. The startup is exploring technical extensions including blockchain and DeFi tools to streamline secondary debt trading. Its current financing mix includes equity and multiple debt facilities that the company is deploying to scale NPL acquisitions and ethical recovery operations.

Participated · Seed · Sep 2022

Bitmama operates a crypto exchange and a social payment product called Changera that issues virtual crypto debit cards funded with stablecoins for remittances and international online purchases. The company began as a WhatsApp group and expanded into formal crypto services including buying, selling, swapping and peer-to-peer transactions. Changera targets non-crypto‑savvy users with simple UI and supports virtual dollar cards with >$10,000 monthly spending limits for online transactions. Bitmama reports user growth from under 20,000 earlier this year to more than 70,000 across its platforms; revenues come from transaction margins. The team is distributed across Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya and the company is U.S.- and Nigeria-based. Future plans include a B2B API offering to let businesses embed crypto services and broader market expansion across Africa. Bitmama operates a crypto exchange and a cross-border payments product, Changera, which lets users buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrencies (including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Celo and six others) and send/receive money internationally, buy airtime, and pay utility bills. The company was founded in 2019 and is based in Delaware and Neuss, Germany. Bitmama has recorded more than $6 million in transaction volume this year and reports over 15,000 users across its two offerings; the team has grown to more than 20 members. The company says its users are active monthly, though the founder would not confirm profitability at this stage. Future plans include expanding current products into other African markets (including Francophone countries and Kenya) and Europe, launching Changera for businesses, opening its wallet API free to developers, and supporting the ecosystem via hackathons. Bitmama has been hiring in engineering and marketing to accelerate product development and feature expansion rather than adding new product lines.

Participated · Equity · Mar 2022

CredPal is a buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) provider that launched a point-of-sale consumer credit service in 2018 and later added a credit card and mobile-app option to expand reach. Its merchant-facing product, CredPal Pay, supports BNPL via credit payment links, checkout plugins, QR codes and a transaction management system for e-commerce, brick-and-mortar and social-commerce merchants. Consumers can access credit from ₦5,000 to ₦500,000 with a 30% down payment and repayment terms of 30 to 180 days; interest rates range from 4% to 9% and some customers pay no interest if they repay within two months (merchant fees cover that interest). The company reports ~20,000 merchant signups, more than 4,000 onboarded merchants (600 monthly active) and a monthly active customer base of 85,000. CredPal has pursued an omnichannel strategy to differentiate from competitors and is pursuing product and geographic expansion. Planned uses of new capital include scaling BNPL across Africa (Kenya, Egypt, Ghana and Cameroon) and securing a partnership with Airtel Nigeria to enable installment smartphone purchases. CredPal is a Nigerian fintech startup founded by former Tutor.ng founder Fehintolu Olaogun alongside new co‑founders. The team attended Y Combinator prior to raising institutional capital. In December 2020 CredPal raised a $1.5 million financing round with GreenHouse Capital listed among the investors. The company emerged after Tutor.ng wound down and represents a subsequent venture by those founders. No product‑level metrics or revenues are disclosed in the article. The financing appears to be an early institutional round that followed the founders’ accelerator experience.

Led · Seed · Mar 2022

Yep! is a digital bank positioning itself as a financial super app offering payments, remittance and banking features for consumers, small businesses and merchants. The startup will leverage E‑Settlement’s existing agent network — which last year served over 5 million customers and 100,000 merchants transacting more than $2 billion — to convert offline customers online and expand into Francophone Africa. Yep! secured a microfinance license to hold agents’ and consumers’ funds, enabling cash‑in/cash‑out, digital accounts, cash issuance and bill payments. Product plans include account opening, debit card issuance, bill payments, credit financing and financial management tools; remittance products are being tested and checking/savings, credit cards and a physical bank for migrants are in the pipeline. The founders emphasize experience raising debt capital and data advantages to underwrite lending to agents; the company currently has a $500,000 credit facility to kick‑start working capital loans and is in talks to expand that to $10 million by the end of 2022. Yep! plans to go live across five markets where E‑Settlement operates (Nigeria, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Togo) and aims to double its agent network to over 200,000 by the end of 2022 to boost financial inclusion.

Participated · Debt Financing · Feb 2022

MarketForce operates RejaReja, a merchant super app that lets informal traders source hundreds of FMCG SKUs directly from manufacturers and distributors, place and pay for orders digitally, accept utility payments, and access loans. The company is rolling out merchant inventory financing (an overdraft-like BNPL for merchants) after a successful pilot that tripled order stock value, and plans to introduce additional fintech services like BNPL, insurance, savings, and investment. RejaReja is asset-light, relying on partner-owned logistics and aims to expand across more East and West African markets. Operational traction includes more than 87,000 orders to date at an average basket of $151, 40% month-on-month growth, and an expected run-rate above $60M in annualized transaction volume last year. MarketForce says it will scale headcount and merchant base rapidly — targeting 250,000 merchants in the coming months (up from 5,000 a year earlier) and previously projecting 1 million merchants by year-end. The company also uses merchant transaction history to build credit profiles and partners with lenders like Pezesha to extend loans. MarketForce operates a retail distribution SaaS and RejaReja, a B2B e-commerce marketplace that lets informal merchants buy FMCGs and digital financial services with next-day delivery for hundreds of SKUs. RejaReja, launched in December 2020, is an asset-light marketplace that leverages partners (distributors, manufacturers, 3PLs) rather than owning warehouses or trucks. The company integrated acquired platform Digiduka to provide a wallet and enable merchants to collect mobile money and bank payments via app, WhatsApp bots, or USSD. MarketForce extends working capital to kiosks based on ordering habits and uses its network to distribute both FMCGs and financial services. The startup has a presence in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania; over 15,000 retail customers use RejaReja to process thousands of orders daily. Its legacy SaaS product has over 10,000 monthly active users, and users have completed 300,000 transactions worth more than $500 million since 2018. With recent traction on the e-commerce side, the company plans to scale RejaReja across more East African towns and launch in Nigeria.