Anchor, a Nigeria-based fintech startup offering banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform has raised $1 million in its pre-seed funding round, alongside making its scalable neo-banking solution public.
The startup was formerly bootstrapped until raising its pre-seed from Byld Ventures, Y Combinator, Luno Expeditions, Niche Capital, Mountain Peak Capital, and angel investors such as Emmanuel Okeleji (SeamlessHR CEO).
Launched seven months ago, Anchor provides APIs, dashboards, and tools to help developers embed and build banking products including accounts, fund transfers, savings products, card issuance, and offering loans. It also provides regulatory coverage and continuous compliance support to its partners. It was accepted into Y Combinator’s 2022 summer batch as the only BaaS startup from Africa.
It is growing 200% month-on-month. It makes its revenues from charging fees and cuts from bill-based transactions on its platform including money movement, account issuing, savings, and deposits among others.
“There’s an understanding of the space as founders and the core team building this. We have seen first-hand the painful process of closing banking partnerships, negotiating third-party contracts, and obtaining regulatory approvals. And more generally, the extensive time and effort required to launch financial products,” the chief executive said.
“We optimize for speed of go to market while at the same time, we don’t compromise on security and scalability. So there are a lot of use cases we’ve built for, that if you start from scratch, it will take you some time to get started stage.”
