Nigerian Digital Bank Yep! Raises $1.5M Pre-Seed

Last week, Yep!, a “financial super app” with payments, remittance, and banking features, announced that it has raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed round led by pan-African VC Greenhouse Capital.

The San Francisco- and Lagos-headquartered startup was started by Olaoluwa Awojoodu, who then teamed up with Airende Ojeomogha and Garry Ottosen to start Yep!.

The startup plans to go live across the five markets where E-Settlement is present, serving digital financial services to consumers, small business owners, and merchants. They also have a mission to enhance financial inclusion by leveraging PayCentre Africa — the startup’s agent banking platform, to ease entry into the formal economy for rural communities, who would otherwise be financially excluded.

The company’s services enable entrepreneurs, small business owners, students, MSMEs, and merchants to gain safe and easy access to financial solutions digitally. Providing account opening, debit card issuance, bill payments and credit financing services to online consumers, and financial management services to both consumers and businesses, Yep! is playing in the same spot as Kuda, Carbon, and FairMoney.

What makes Yep! special, according to its founders, is a superior experience in raising debt capital for lending purposes — a practice where agency banking providers supply working capital to their agents who in turn lend to their end consumers. 

“We want to bank the guys in Lagos as well as bank the guys in a village at Ikot Ekpene. And at the same time, not just Nigeria, we are also looking at a full African play,” said co-founder and CEO Awojoodu to TechCrunch over a call.

“So it’s just really that financial access for Africans, not just the guys that are digitally enabled, but even the guys that are off the digital channels, we are going to bring everybody into the digital environment using both digital tools and agent networks.”