Nigerian Digital Bank Kuda Raises $10 Million Dollars, The Largest Ever Seed Round in Africa

Nigeria’s first fully digital bank, Kuda, has raised $10 million in seed funding. This was revealed by Tech Crunch in a blogpost. This investment represents the largest seed fund to be raised by a tech company in Africa.

This latest investment is Kuda’s second fundraising, following a $1.5 million pre-seed investment back in September 2019. According to Kuda CEO, Babs Ogundeyi, the bank aims to cater to every African on the planet regardless of where they are.

European VC firm, Target Global led the funding round and was supported by Entrée Capital and SBI Investment. Other notable investors include Raffael Johnen (founder of Auxmoney), Johan Lorenzen (founder of Holvi), Brandon Krieg/Ed Robinson (founders of Stash), and Oliver and Lish Jung (angel investors in Nubank, Revolut, and Chime).

Kuda has come a long way since rebranding from Kudimoney, a simple fintech platform offering regular fintech solutions. In July 2019, Kudimoney received a Microfinance banking licence from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), a significant leap in its transition into Kuda; a full service digital No-Fee bank.

The fully-licensed digital bank made it clear from the onset that it was seeking to challenge the existing banking system that is riddled with tales of often inefficient services coupled with ridiculous charges to millions of customers.

This followed a 2018 report that the top 11 Nigerian banks charged their customers a total of N143 billion as account maintenance fees. Of this sum, the CBN recovered over N65 billion charges wrongfully deducted from customers’ deposits as transaction fees.

But Kuda wouldn’t commence full digital banking services until September 2019 after the afore-mentioned pre-seed funding round which enabled it to deploy its app and generally launch its operations in Nigeria. At the time, its CEO, Babs Ogundeyi warned that the bank won’t be operating as a glorified fintech platform.

“We’re not a mobile wallet or simply a mobile app piggybacking on an existing bank. We have built our own full-stack banking software from scratch. We can also take deposits and connect directly to the switch

Babs Ogundeyi, CEO Kuda

Exactly a year after it launched, Kuda has largely kept to its promise, delivering full banking services, payments options, deposits and withdrawals. But beyond all these, Kuda launched its Web feature in June 2020. This feature allows its customers to track their money in real-time.

Presently, Kuda has around 300,000 customers and processes over $500 million worth of transactions every month. According to the CEO, the digital bank is also looking to formally launch a small business product whose features will be tailored for small business owners and entrepreneurs in 2021.