Barely a week after Grey, one of Nigeria’s fast-growing digital payment startups, announced the successful completion of its $2.5 million seed funding round, another firm in the rapidly evolving digital payment space, Duplo has announced its raising $4.3 million in a new seed round deal .
The startup’s latest funding round feat, which brings its total raised fund to $5.6 million, is coming about seven months after it announced its $1.3 million pre-seed investment.
Investors that participated in the seed new round include Liquid2 Ventures, Soma Capital, Tribe Capital, Commerce Ventures, Basecamp Fund, Y Combinator, and existing investor Oui Capital.
According to the promoters, Duplo will be leveraging the fund to launch new products and expand into new business areas in Nigeria.
Speaking on the fund raising round , Duplo’s CEO and Co-founder, Yele Oyekola, said: “We have seen a lot of innovation in consumer payments in Africa in recent years but business-to-business payments have largely stayed the same.
“We strongly believe that there is a great opportunity to catalyse growth and maximise business opportunities across the continent by removing the bottlenecks that hinder the seamless flow of money between businesses and we are excited to have raised funding from this exciting group of investors to deliver this much-needed transformation.
“We’re also trying to expand into new verticals. Initially, we started with the FMCG industry; now we’ve seen interest in the construction industry, telecoms, and these major mid-sized enterprise businesses, and set up the foundation to scale across the continent hopefully in the next nine to 12 months”, Oyekola added.
In his remarks, Principal at Oui Capital, Peter Oriaifo, enthused: “The Duplo team has built an incredible suite of products that improve how businesses make and receive payments from each other, and the growth that the company has experienced since our initial pre-seed investment in 2021 has been nothing short of impressive.
“It is for this reason that we are excited to back Duplo once more”, he added.
Since it came live in January this year, the digital payment startup has made remarkable impact among FMCG distributors and finance teams of midsize and enterprise businesses by helping them to digitise and simplify their payment transactions.
Launched in September 2021, the firm’s end-to-end solution automates the back-office processes of generating and processing invoices, receiving and approving bills, collecting and disbursing funds, and completing account reconciliation for finance teams.
The startup has also been dealing in major accounting and ERP platforms such as Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, QuickBooks and Sage, and payments processed through Duplo are automatically synced with these platforms in real-time.
