Prospa announces $3.8m pre-seed round
Prospa has raised a $3.8m pre-seed fund to offer software and financial services to Nigerian entrepreneurs and micro-businesses. The pre-seed round was oversubscribed by 380% to become the largest pre-seed round in Nigeria’s Fintech history.
Leading entrepreneurs/executives from Teachable, Square, Facebook, Nubank participate
Y Combinator backed Nigerian startup, Prospa has raised a $3.8m pre-seed fund to offer software and financial services to Nigerian entrepreneurs and micro-businesses. The pre-seed round was oversubscribed by 380% to become the largest pre-seed round in Nigeria’s Fintech history.
Prospa’s pre-seed round was supported by venture capital firms, Global Founders Capital and Liquid 2 Ventures. Influential entrepreneurs who participated in the round include Teachable’s Ankur Nagpal, Mercury’s Immad Akhund, Ramp’s Karim Atiyeh, Todd Goldberg and Rahul Vohra’s investment fund and foremost entrepreneurs from Facebook, Square, and Nubank.
Earlier in 2021, Prospa was one of the 10 Africa startups that got into Ycombinator winter 2021. Prospa plans to accelerate customer acquisition, expand product portfolio and strengthen its team with focus on product and engineering.
It has a user base growth of 35% month-over-month and currently has thousands of users who subscribe monthly. Since Prospa was founded in October 2019, users have sent 360,000 invoices and logged 20,000 unique inventory items monthly on the platform.
Co-Founder/CEO Frederik Obasi said, “At Prospa, we believe that successful small businesses can foster prosperity for Nigerians everywhere. Our goal is to power every Nigerian entrepreneur so that they achieve scale. This is the opportune moment: we’re seeing a huge demand for our service.”
GFC Head of North America, Don Stalter, asserts that “The Prospa team is building a world class product that is tailored to the needs of Nigeria's entrepreneurs. They have executed brilliantly and we’re happy to partner with Prospa on their journey to become the OS for Nigeria's entrepreneurs and micro-businesses.”
Also, Mercury Founder/CEO, Immad Akhund said “The Prospa team has developed a stellar product serving the needs of Nigeria's entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are the backbone of the Nigerian economy and I am excited to support them through this investment in Prospa.”
ABOUT PROSPA
Prospa was launched in 2019 by Frederik Obasi, Chioma Ugo and Rodney Jackson-Cole. Their goal was to increase the growth of Nigerian small businesses. As a tech and media entrepreneur, Obasi experienced first hand the struggles small businesses faced in running basic accounting and banking activities. This motivated him and his team to develop an app that provided banking and financial software services for micro-businesses.
The app helps users to open a bank account within 5 minutes, access a suite of tools which runs invoicing, employee payroll, inventory management, e-commerce platform and analytics dashboard to scale their businesses.
Micro-businesses and small and medium sized enterprises (MSMEs) are the core pillar of the Nigerian economy, driving nearly 50% of GDP and 80% of employment. Building MSMEs have a powerful ripple effect in improving the quality of life for all Nigerians.
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