NIGERIA – OnePipe, a Nigerian fintech startup, has secured a US$950,000 pre-seed funding round to implement its “banking as a service” solution and expand its user base.
According to the startup’s founder and CEO, Ope Adeoye, the round was led by the team at US seed-stage accelerator, Techstars, and African impact-focused VC fund, Atlantica Ventures.
Several institutional investors like Future Perfect Ventures, Raba Capital, P1 Ventures, Ingressive Capital, Sherpa Ventures Africa, Zedcrest Capital, DFS Lab also participated.
Angel investors weren’t left out as Chris Adelsbach, an early investor in Kuda; Idris Ayo Bello; Jim Chu; Haresh Aswani; Vishal Agarwal; and Folabi Esan; among others, wrote cheques.
Because of this investment, Aniko Szigetvari and Ik Kanu, Founding Partners of Atlantica Ventures; and Charles Ifedi, Co-founder of Pan-African payments giant, Interswitch are now part of the startup’s advisory council. Also on the council are Jenny Fielding, Managing Director of Techstars; and Raj Kulasingam, an Indian business angel.
“With this shot in the arm, we are now prepared to chase down some of the opportunities that we feel would have been further along in our journey. The vote of confidence inspires us, and now we want to double down,” Adeoye said.
Before starting OnePipe, Adeoye was a senior software engineer at Interswitch from 2006 to 2008 before leaving the company to join telco, Zain Nigeria.
In what he describes as his second coming, the following year Adeoye rejoined Interswitch where he assumed many roles in the company’s consumer and mobile services department. This included being the product and business unit lead until 2015. From then until 2017, when he left, he worked at the strategy, mergers and acquisitions unit.
During his time at Interswitch, Adeoye says he led the creation of the Quickteller product line and ran it as a business unit before handing it over. And in the two years spent at strategy, mergers and acquisitions he was involved in sourcing and initiating the company’s acquisition of financial services provider, VANSO.
After spending 11 years at Interswitch Nigeria, Adeoye launched 2i Labs in 2018. As a startup studio, Adeoye and his team brainstormed on ideas that they could fund and grow into companies.
Liked this article? Subscribe to DealStreet Africa News, our regular email newsletter with the latest news, deals and insights from Africa’s business, economy and more. SUBSCRIBE
