Microtraction Announces Investment in AllPro, a Startup that Offers Loans to Nigerian Schools

Microtraction is widening its already impressive investment spree. The company has just announced a new investment in Allpro, a school management software (SMS) company with a focus on financial services.

This is the VC firm’s fourth investment since its creation and its second this week alone.

We are excited to announce @microtraction’s investment in Allpro.

Allpro is building the future of school management and financing on the continent. https://t.co/SvwdCHiEPE

— Yele Bademosi (@YeleBademosi) August 15, 2018

Unlike its previous investments, Allpro has a twist to its operations. The investment in Allpro appears an interesting move by Microtraction.

What is Allpro?

Founded by Henry Nnalue and Angela Essien, Allpro provides credit to schools by analyzing data derived from a school’s management software.

The founders have a deep understanding of school management systems as they have both previously worked on one called Klipboard. The vast data generated by systems like Allpro can and do provide insights into behavioural patterns. Similar to services like Paylater, these insights can be used as a basis to offer credit assistance to various schools.

Allpro is an end-to-end lending platform for schools in Africa making education affordable and credit accessible for schools, parents, and teachers. They do this by underwriting risk using data gathered from its fee payment and school management software pic.twitter.com/OeCEbJgOzd

— Yele Bademosi (@YeleBademosi) August 15, 2018

Interestingly too, according to Mr Yele Badamosi, Microtraction’s Founder & Managing Partner, Nigeria has a high number of private schools; over 40,000. But combined, these schools have revenues exceeding $1 billion. Yet, a majority of them are still finding it difficult to get loans from banks to grow their services. This makes it hard for these schools, to scale and improve their services.

This necessitated the need to develop Allpro. The startup is developed as an end-to-end financing platform for schools in the country. It also comes bundled with a payments infrastructure for parents to pay their children’s school fees conveniently. Together, these make it easy for schools to access needed credit to scale their enterprise.

AllPro, Not a School Management Software Competitor

As holistic as it may appear, Allpro does not see itself as a school management software. As a matter of fact, the startup has partnered SchoolCompass.ng for that service. The partnership gives Allpro payments access to SchoolCompass’ over 2,000 existing client base. And it temporarily frees Allpro from the sales drama that comes with marketing the new service.

“What we cared about when we invested in Allpro was the product strategy and if the founders could execute on the product vision,” said Yele Badamosi. “Once we were confident about being able to help them with those risk areas, investing made sense to us.”

We are amazingly pumped to be a part of this journey with Henry, Angela & the rest of the Allpro team #BuildOurFuture

— Yele Bademosi (@YeleBademosi) August 15, 2018

Badamosi also added that Allpro operates in 30+ schools with a waiting list of over 90 schools. And has processed about $1.4m in fee payments and with over 12,000 students on the platform.

This investment is the latest so far this week by Microtraction; last weekend, Mr. Badamosi, first announced that three new investments would be unveiled this week.

True to that promise, at the start of the week, Microtraction shared information about its investment in Wallet.ng, a microloan company. We still await the third announcement.