Pezesha Raises $11m To Grow Embedded Finance Platform
The Kenya-based embedded finance fintech startup offers a B2B digital lending infrastructure that provides affordable working capital to financially-excluded SMEs in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Pezesha has raised a pre-Series A investment of US$11 million to scale operations in its core markets and grow into new ones within Sub-Saharan Africa.
Partners integrate seamlessly with Pezesha’s APIs and offer credit and other financial services to their merchant network at the point of sale. Its credit-scoring APIs act as the engine of a simple but robust process where MSMEs receive real-time loan offers to purchase stock and pay later.
Pezesha has grown the value of its disbursements by over 2,000 per cent in the last two years and disbursed more than 100,000 loans to MSMEs in Kenya, Uganda, and Ghana. The US$11 million funding round will be used to grow its presence in East Africa and expand to the West African market.
According to Pezesha, the round was a mix of US$6 million equity and US$5 million debt. It was led by Women’s World Banking Capital Partners II, a gender-lens investment fund established by US-based non-profit organisation Women’s World Banking and managed by WWB Asset Management. Other strategic investors included Verdant Frontiers Fintech Fund, cFund, IOG, Talanton, and Verdant Capital Specialist.
Pezesha also opens the debt liquidity market by working with strategic institutional investors such as IOG-Cardano. Through this partnership, the company can access affordable capital by layering DeFi liquidity channels on top of the scalable digital lending infrastructure.
Hilda Moraa, Pezesha Founder, said: “We are excited about attracting institutional investors led by the Women’s World Banking Capital Partners II to harness our growth plans and push our mission to the next level. We are equally excited that WWBCP II intentionally invests in women, which allows us to cement inclusivity in our growth plans as a sustainable path towards our vision of building Africa’s MSME lending infrastructure.”
Christina Juhasz, Chief Investment Officer at Women’s World Banking Asset Management, said: “We’re excited to join Pezesha’s journey. Pezesha is dedicated to solving Africa’s working capital problem through its robust lending infrastructure. This investment will allow them to deepen the range of financial products offered especially to women-owned MSMEs.
“We look forward to teaming up with Pezesha as it drives financial inclusion in Africa and continues to increase the number of women served in its business ecosystem,” Juhasz added.