Nigerian fintech firm “TeamApt” recently completed a significant fundraising round, bringing QED Investors on board, one of the top fintech gurus around the globe. The fintech startup TeamApt provides banking and commercial payments services and is rumoured to have secured a new fundraising round of over $50 million.
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Novastar Ventures, Lightrock, and Bill were some investors who already had money in the company. QED Investors, a venture capital firm that focuses on the financial technology industry in the United States, led the investment.
TeamApt was established in 2015 to address inefficiencies in Nigeria’s expanding market for digital financial services. The company offers a wide range of products. The company has obtained a switching licence from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and a Series A funding round of US$5.5 million in 2019. Its clientele consists of all of the country’s commercial banks, making up one hundred per cent of those institutions.
The company has closed another major round led by QED, a premier venture capital firm that has invested in 27 unicorns across over 180 portfolio companies in 14 different countries. The Series B funding round the startup raised was for multiple millions of US dollars the previous year. It has made its first investment in Africa through TeamApt. In addition to new investors, existing investors from the previous Series B round, including Novastar Ventures, Lightrock, and BII, took part in this round.
TeamApt runs Nigeria’s most extensive business payments and banking platform, which currently has more than 400,000 businesses onboarded and processes an annualised run-rate transaction value of $100 billion US dollars. Its all-in-one business solution aims to digitalise Africa’s economy and is laying the groundwork that will provide Nigeria’s 41 million SMBs with digital payment acceptance channels, access to working capital and business expansion loans, and business management tools such as expense management, accounting, and book-keeping solutions to manage their operations. This will allow Africa’s economy to become more competitive globally.
TeamApt’s CEO, Tosin Eniolorunda, said the company is adding more credit products because of this funding round.
“The investment made by QED demonstrates that TeamApt has the potential to experience exponential growth and become a world-class financial institution at the vanguard of Africa’s economic transformation.” As one of the essential fintech operators in Nigeria, QED is providing us with the necessary fintech experience as we work toward expanding our product throughout Africa. TeamApt will continue digitising Africa’s economy, enabling growth, inclusion and access to financial services. This will be possible because of QED’s experience as an operator and TeamApt’s strong management team.
QED Investors is a significant venture capital business that operates internationally and is headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, in the United States (US). QED Investors is a global investment firm established in 2007 by Nigel Morris and Frank Rotman with the mission of investing in innovative firms providing financial services. In September 2021, QED announced that it had successfully closed a US$1.05 billion fund that had been substantially oversubscribed. The fund consisted of US$550 million allocated to early-stage investments through QED Fund VII and US$500 million allocated to a new Growth Fund.
In February of 2022, the company made the initial announcement that it would be expanding into Africa and hired Gbenga Ajayi and Chidinma Iwueke to head up its investments on the continent.
According to Gbenga Ajayi, a partner at QED Investors and the head of Africa operations, “I am proud to bring Africa to QED and QED to Africa.” I was trying to think of a better method to join the continent, and I could not come up with anything better than our investment in TeamApt. Tosin and his colleagues have painstakingly constructed an outstanding payment and distribution network across Nigeria for the past five years. They will be able to keep building a more extensive network because their unit economics are solid and positive, and they pay a lot of attention to what their customers want.
The pan-African expansion play that TeamApt has been working on is still active, according to Eniolorunda, and the company is planning to launch its first wave of international expansion inside the continent within the next few months, which will help boost African technology.