Bloom, a Sudan-based fintech that offers a high-yield savings account and adjacent digital banking services, has raised a $6.5 million seed round. This investment is coming after the startup’s undisclosed pre-seed round last year.
This financing welcomed participation from fintech giant Visa, Y Combinator, U.S.-based VCs Global Founders Capital (GFC) and Goodwater Capital and UAE-based early-stage firm VentureSouq. Other investors include angels Arash Ferdowsi, Dropbox co-founder; Nicolas Kopp, former U.S. CEO of N26; footballers Blaise Matuidi and Kieran Gibbs; and early employees at Revolut and Tide.
The investment from Visa came as one of the incentives for Bloom’s participation in the global card scheme’s Fintech Fast Track Program. A partnership was formed, and as a result, Bloom — the first Sudanese startup to get admitted into the program — switched its cards from Mastercard to Visa.
“The Visa investment is critical for companies like us for a couple of reasons. One, aligning with Visa as a partner gives you a bunch of benefits, launching products faster, marketing support and product support; and two, in addition to the investment, Visa Fintech Fast Track enables you to access these incentives in a streamlined way,” CEO Ahmed Ismail told TechCrunch in an interview.
In March, the company announced that it was a part of Y Combinator’s winter batch this year after launching from stealth that same month. Also, Bloom’s waitlist was made public in March, and at the time, the company had more than 15,000 people signed up; that number has topped 100,000, the founders told TechCrunch. They say the platform has been launched in Sudan but declined to give specific numbers of customers actively using the product.