Precursor Ventures, Vested World, Y Combinator, FoundersX, and Mercy Corp Ventures backed Pivo Africa in a $2 million seed round.
Suppliers involved in complex supply chains, wholesale distributors, and SMEs can take advantage of Pivo’s all-in-one financial services platform.
Founded in 2021, the company helps clients manage their cash flow with credit, transactions, and spending management. Pivo makes it easy for SMEs to make, collect, and monitor payments.
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Pivo Africa raises capital to expand product offerings
To enhance transaction management and payment reconciliation for supply chains, Pivo will utilize the funding to develop new products and modify current ones. For their client group’s normal recurring payments, the anticipated update will offer improved payment possibilities. Along with expanding operations to East Africa and expanding its personnel, the firm also wants to increase its footprint outside of its Lagos headquarters.
“After our pre-seed round of $550,000 in Q1 of this year, we launched Pivo Business,” says CEO and co-founder Nkiru Amadi-Emina. Between April and September, Pivo Business transaction volume rose by 400%. We want to create supply chain anchor solutions with this money.
Daniel Block, Investment Principal at Mercy Corps Ventures said, “When we first invested last year, we believed that the founders’ deep logistics industry expertise and commitment to unattended supply chain SMEs would enable Pivo to quickly carve out a deep moat in the competitive fintech lending space.”
In North and Central Africa, Amadi-Emina introduced an on-demand delivery platform in 2017. Kobo360, one of the most well-known e-commerce players in Africa, purchased the platform.
“As Pivo introduces new products to move from a pure fintech lender to a full-fledged financial services platform, we’re pleased to see the firm provide a comprehensive array of financial services,” Daniel Block says.
Amadi-Emina and Ijeoma Akwiwu are Y Combinator’s first all-female team in Nigeria. “We smashed a barrier as a female-led startup.” “YC acknowledged us as entrepreneurs and demonstrated women can lead in tech,” said Amadi-Emina.
Tech is male-dominated, and man-made hurdles prevent women from entering. Getting into YC means more people will see strong female representation from Nigeria. We hope a female entrepreneur somewhere sees us and realizes that if she works hard, applies herself, and has the data to back it up, she can accomplish her goals.
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More about Pivo
Pivo, which was founded in 2021 by Nkiru Amadi-Emina and Ijeoma Akwiwu, has supported the expansion of SMEs via secured working capital loans, asset financing, and trade finance solutions. Customers may also have transactional banking in the form of current smart accounts, payments, and basic accounting tools.
It is intended for any company involved in the import, export, manufacturing, distribution, and retail of FMCG, logistics and haulage, and clearing and forwarding.
The company’s three major products are as follows: Pivot Capital, the company’s core product, provides SMEs with loans up to $50,000. Meanwhile, Pivo Finance provides consumers with a digital-only banking solution, and Pivo Plus provides insurance, business compliance, and tax regulatory help.