Canza Finance, an emerging markets neobank that is building the world’s largest non-institutional-based financial system, announced today the completion of its $3.27M seed round.
The fundraising round was led by Fenbushi Capital, with participation from Dominance Ventures, Bixin Ventures, ConsenSys Mesh, Protocol Labs, Emurgo Ventures, MEXC Global, NGC Ventures, XanPool, HashKey, the founders of Celo and others.
This funding enables Canza to continue headcount growth and expand its service offering in Nigeria and other growth regions including South America and Asia.
“Today, we stand at a critical juncture in the journey to democratizing finance, with Nigeria emerging at the vanguard of crypto adoption globally. Against a backdrop of high inflation, financial instability and barriers to access of traditional financial services, sub-Saharan Africa’s underdeveloped financial infrastructure has made the region a perfect vector for decentralized finance — according to a 2021 report by KPMG, more than 1 in 3 Nigerian adults are excluded from traditional finance. Our vision is to become leaders in decentralized finance and to spearhead this movement to offer financial freedom to millions of individuals. The tremendous interest and backing of our investors and strategic partners will enable us to grow the world-class Canza team, improve our security and most importantly take a definitive leadership position in our target markets.”
Oyedeji Oluwoye, Co-founder and CTO of Canza Finance, commented,
Established in 2020, Canza relies on a robust network of experienced local money market players to distribute financial and transaction-based services to users in Sub-Saharan African countries. Canza’s seamless crypto on/off-ramp services enable a wide range of DeFi services including staking, P2P and cross border settlements—aiming to contribute to the creation of an innovative and fully decentralized financial system.
Canza is a member of Celo’s Alliance for Prosperity, an ecosystem of 140+ mission-aligned organizations including nonprofits, merchants, and payment processors fostering social impact using the Celo blockchain. Today, Canza has over 7,000 Celo wallets created via the USSD DApp with weekly transactions averaging over $200,000.
