Fintech Zazuu Raises $2M For African Remittance Platform
Black-owned money movement, Zazuu, has raised $2 million in investment funding in a new venture round. The startup, which works to build a more robust remittance for residents in the diaspora, has quickly evolved to become the world’s first cross-border payment marketplace.
Zazuu, co-founded in 2018 by Kay Akinwunmi, Korede Fanilola, Tola Alade, and Tosin Ekolie, is on a mission to ease the difficulty of sending money back home, which is currently expensive, slow, and unfair to millions of migrant customers. The platform has helped empower customers by building an online, transparent, ethical solution and helps people become smarter with money.
The founders have professional backgrounds in technology, design, banking, and finance. Their shared experience of dealing with institutional biases encouraged the group to come together and solve the challenge in 2018, ultimately leading to the birth of the money movement platform Zazuu.
“The mission has always been simple for us from day one. Africans have consistently gotten the shorter end of the stick with remittance transactions,” said co-founder of Zazuu, Kay Akinwunmi.
“We discovered that the primary reason for that was a lack of transparency on the part of the providers. We’re solving that problem by building a smarter way to transfer money. With Zazuu, users can search multiple money transfer providers in their region, compare the rates and fees, and then choose who to send money with, at no extra cost.”
Zazuu first evolved from a chatbot informing users of daily rates on Facebook to a Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) licensed organization that provides services to users in eight countries across North America and Europe. Almost 100,000 people have used Zazuu’s Search and Compare service to find the best rates for their money movement activities.
The new funding brings their total amount to $2 million, which will help the platform build a more robust system that offers more features to residents in the diaspora.
