Tanzanian Fintech NALA Raises $10M Seed To build Revolut For Africa

NALA, a Tanzanian cross-border payments company that recently pivoted from local to international money transfers, has raised $10 million in a new fundraising round.

It comes almost three years after NALA secured a seven-figure pre-seed round led by Accel in 2019.

It received funds from an impressive group of angel investors — Jonas Templestein, co-founder and CTO of Monzo; Vladimir Tenev, Robinhood co-founder and CEO; Deel founder Alex Bouaziz; Laura Spiekerman, co-founder of Alloy; Peeyush Ranjan, the head of Google Payments and early employees at Revolut and TransferWise.

Sheel Tyle, the founder and general partner at Amplo will join NALA’s board, the company said.

Since the companies, first-round NALA has built a mobile money service in East Africa and scaled it to more than 250,000 users. 

In 2020, NALA started testing international money transfers after some users expressed interest in moving money from the U.K. to East African countries (Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania), thus ushering the Tanzanian fintech into the remittance business.

The platform allows payments from the U.K. to Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Ghana. And in the past six months, more than 8,000 customers have moved over $10 million in transaction volume to Africa, according to the company.

With Africa being the most expensive region to send money to, with 10.6% in average transaction fees, digital senders like NALA pitch themselves to customers as platforms with the best rates and lowest prices, reports TechCrunch.

“Our core customer base is the diaspora right now who live in the U.K. This is the customer we’re currently serving today as we speak,” founder and CEO Benjamin Fernandes told the tech media in an interview. “We also got our license approvals to go live in the U.S. and the E.U., which will be going live in a month and a half in at least one other E.U. country, probably France.”