Venture capital firm 468 Capital led the round with participation from Presight Ventures, Jigsaw VC, and high profile angels Mato Peric, Leonard Stiegeler, Laurin Hainy and Thomas Stafford.
The company is currently in stealth mode and will use the new capital to build out its mobile product offer, scale its engineering team and expand its user base across 12 sub-Saharan African countries with high mobile money penetration.
Bamba, founded in 2022 by serial entrepreneur and investor, Bastian Gotter, is a mobile application focusing on simple tools for merchants to manage their customers, record stocks, receive payments, make payments, and access cash advances against their future cash flow.
Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises account for 90 percent of all businesses in sub-Saharan Africa and contribute more than half of all jobs. In 2021, registered and unregistered merchants accepted over $250 billion in mobile money payments, recording rapid growth.
The mixture of receiving/paying out cash or mobile money creates new complexities for merchants; however, it also creates opportunities to digitalise business payment and record-keeping processes further.
This digitalisation process has the potential to vastly improve access to credit, one of the most significant hurdles preventing the growth of small businesses in Africa.
The IFC estimates Sub-Saharan Africa’s small business credit gap at $331 billion. Bamba’s mobile application sits at the heart of the digitalisation process improving both the payments experience and the access to credit for micro merchants.