Pngme

We are excited to announce that we have raised a further $15 million in Series A funding as we set out to grow our financial data infrastructure and machine learning-as-a-service platform. Check out our announcement in TechCrunch. The round was led by Octopus Ventures a $1.7bn Venture Capital fund based in London and comes less than a year after our $3 million Seed round. From the beginning, our mission has been to enable access to finance for everyone by providing mission-critical data infrastructure and machine learning models for the next generation of financial services. We are thrilled to have such incredible backing as we enter this new phase of growth. We are using the Series A raise to expand our executive team with the hiring of Lorraine Kageni Maina as Chief Strategy Officer and Nick Masson as Chief Technology Officer. Lorraine brings corporate experience in sub-Saharan Africa from Banking, FMCG, and Technology. Nick has led large enterprise-scale engineering teams at WeWork and joins us with an ambitious vision to scale Pngme’s cutting-edge technology. Alongside key executive hires, Pngme is expanding its data science, engineering, product, and sales teams globally to meet the demand for integrations across large enterprise banks, credit bureaus, MFBs, fintechs, and neo banks. Check out our open roles HERE across the company. “With the demand we are seeing in our core markets and from financial institutions globally, it is clear we are solving a major pain point by building financial data infrastructure and machine learning-as-a-service. With this fresh injection of capital we are not only scaling up our data processing and machine learning capabilities but also building a robust team that can deliver on our mission of financial inclusion”. Brendan Playford, CEO of Pngme We are overjoyed to be working with Octopus Ventures and look forward to collaborating with their team and benefitting from their industry expertise and guidance. Octopus Ventures invests in technology leaders across health, fintech, consumer and B2B software with a focus on companies committed to pioneering the future of efficient transactions and inclusive technology. We are thrilled to be part of the firm’s fintech portfolio with cazoo, sprout.ai, semafone and digital shadows among others, and are proud to join WeFarm as the firm’s second Africa-based investment. Octopus Ventures are joined by Lateral Capital, Unshackled Ventures, Raptor Group, EchoVC, Future Africa, Aruwa Capital Management Two Small Fish Ventures, the 51 and a talented group of individual angel investors including RallyCap’s Hayden Simmons, Plaid’s Dan Khan, former COO of RBC Capital Markets Richard Talbot, Creative Destruction Lab mentors, and Intersect VC’s Kyle Ellicott among others. We are excited to expand our product and engineering capabilities and continue to build and deliver mission-critical data infrastructure and out-of-the-box machine learning capabilities for financial institutions and fintechs across sub-Saharan Africa. Pngme’s infrastructure has processed billions of data points from hundreds of financial institutions across sub-Saharan Africa and we plan to double down on our Insights Library and expand our third-party data connections to other markets over the next year. Cate Rung, COO of Pngme We wouldn’t be where we are today without our community of customers and investors who believe in our vision and our mission. We cannot thank them enough for their guidance, collaboration, and support. We are ready and better positioned than ever to further scale our services in the year ahead and to continue our mission for financial inclusion.