Bankly Raises $2 Million Seed Funding Led by Flutterwave to Scale across Nigeria

Nigerian fintech startup, Bankly has raised $2 million in a seed funding round.

The round was led by co-investors including African payments unicorn, Flutterwave and Vault, the holding company of VANSO, a fintech acquired by Interswitch in 2016.

Other investors who participated in the seed round include Plug and Play Ventures, Rising Tide Africa and Chrysalis Capital.

Backed with new seed funding, Bankly will onboard more agents on its platform. The agents are paid commissions on each transaction completed by a customer through them. Bankly currently has about 15,000 agents across Nigeria.

The startup wants to leverage its latest funding to increase its 35,000 customers in cash-dependent communities and also launch a variety of direct-to-consumer products in the coming months.

Founded by Tomilola Adejana and Fredrick Adams in 2018, Bankly provides a digital savings and peer to peer transfer platform where users can fund their wallets using tokens available on Bankly vouchers nationwide in a “recharge to save” model. The model is analogous to the mobile airtime top up available on MTN and other network operators in Nigeria.

With about 50 million Nigerians having no bank account, Bankly digitizes cash transactions for the unbanked population, allowing people to save their money using online and offline methods.

Functioning in a similar way to traditional banks but with fewer assets, revenue and customers, Bankly lets users collate and save cash with a collector who is responsible for disbursing funds when due.