Duplo, a Nigeria-based provider of a business-to-business payment platform, has raised $4.3 million in seed funding.
Early-stage pan-African VC firm Oui Capital led the US$4.3 million pre-seed round, and also features the likes of MyAsia VC, Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, and Mono CEO Abdul Hassan. Y Combinator is also an investor after Duplo was confirmed as a participant in its latest program, alongside a host of other African startups.
Duplo will use the funding to improve its product, develop its technology, build its sales capacity, and move into other sectors. The company is currently doing business in the FMCG retail space, but it also wants to get into the travel, agriculture, B2B marketplaces, and alcohol and beverage spaces.
The company, founded in September 2021, solves payment issues for businesses of all sizes, enabling African enterprises to collect payments from their clients and partners and make payments to their suppliers and vendors with ease and cost-effectiveness.
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News of the funding comes seven months after Duplo announced its $1.3 million pre-seed investment. In total, the YC-backed startup has received $5.6 million since Yele Oyekola, and Tunde Akinnuwa launched it in September 2021.
More about Duplo
Led by CEO Yele Oyekola and CPO Tunde Akinnuwa, Duplo is a B2B payment platform that enables African businesses to pay each other by providing digital tools that enable an efficient, cost-effective, and transparent process of making and receiving payments.
Since its launch in January 2022, Duplo has gone live with FMCG distributors as its first set of customers.
FMCG businesses can perform all their payment operation needs on Duplo and offer their customers financial services, helping them digitize and simplify the way money moves between them and their business partners. The startup is a “financial operating system for B2B companies.
FMCG distributors can onboard retailers in their network on the Duplo platform. This makes it easier for them to collect payments digitally and access real-time insights into business performance. They can also automate payments to vendors, manufacturers, and suppliers, with instant payments enabling them to transact in larger quantities.
For finance teams, the solution automates the back office tasks of creating and processing invoices, receiving and approving bills, collecting and distributing funds, and balancing accounts.
Duplo works with all major accounting and ERP platforms, such as Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, QuickBooks, and Sage, and payments processed through Duplo are automatically synced with these platforms in real-time, saving the finance team time and cost while reducing errors and fraud.
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FMCG distributors can also track and reconcile payments while automating payments to vendors, manufacturers, and suppliers, with instant payments enabling them to transact in larger quantities.
“When we think of payments in the continent or even Nigeria, for example, there’s a lot of focus on merchants collecting payments from customers. And from the B2B angle, what startups help them with is just collection and payout. Still, there’s a massive value in assisting them in tracking and reconciling payments in real time, which is where we play a significant role.
For obvious reasons, we are trying to make cash obsolete in African merchants, where many businesses in the distribution space heavily transact in cash. We are focused on distributors, merchants, and aggregators to stop using caspph in this value chain because everyone knows how expensive cash is and how difficult it is to move with issues around theft and fraud.
Our value proposition is we help businesses automate, embed and launch payment products. Basically, inflows or outflows, automatic reconciliations for businesses and embedding payments into marketplaces. And then we also have businesses that want to provide BNPL services to smaller businesses.” Duplo CEO Yele Oyekola said.
Peter Oriaifo, principal at Oui Capital, said he was excited to support the Duplo team as it worked to build a scalable B2B payments platform for the African market. “We’re excited to support Yele, Tunde, Emeka, and the rest of the team at Duplo as they look to build a scalable B2B payments platform for the African market.”
“We believe that with the proliferation of commerce in Africa, there’s an emerging need for solutions such as Duplo’s that help abstract away complexities around payments,” he said.
According to Duplo, businesses can cut time spent on administrative tasks such as account reconciliation by up to 50% and reduce payment-related costs by up to 85 percent.