Anchor, a Nigerian Banking-as-a-Service fintech startup, has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding. The Y Combinator-backed startup will use this investment to attract the best talent, improve the company’s tech infrastructure, invest in compliance and regulatory infrastructure, and acquire customers.
Byld Ventures, Y Combinator, Luno Expeditions, Niche Capital, Mountain Peak Capital, and angel investors such as SeamlessHR CEO Emmanuel Okeleji are among those backing the BaaS fintech.
Segun Adeyemi, Olamide Sobowale, and Gbekeloluwa Olufotebi co-founded the startup last year. Anchor provides APIs, dashboards, and tools to help developers embed and build banking products such as bank accounts, funds transfers, savings products, issuing cards, and offering loans.
Anchor claims to be transacting millions of dollars and growing at a rate of 200% monthly. The startup generates revenue by charging fees and taking cuts from every billable aspect of the business, including account issuing, money movement, savings, and deposits.
Anchor’s co-founder and CEO, Segun Adeyemi, announced the company’s fundraising, saying that after months of building and talking to their early customers, Anchor is exiting private beta and launching its public beta with a pre-seed round.
The company was accepted into the Y Combinator Summer 2022 batch as Africa’s first banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform.
Adeyemi began his journey to Anchor in 2015 when he co-founded Amplifypay, a recurring payments and direct debit company. Carbon, one of Africa’s largest digital banks, acquired Amplifypay in 2019. He worked at JUMO, Africa’s biggest credit infrastructure provider, from 2019 to 2021. He advised some of Nigeria’s largest fintechs and digital banks during this time.
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