OnePipe Raises $3.5Million to Expand the Fintech’s Space

Two years on a stretch the fintech players in Nigeria have defined the digital economic space and they’ve added strong financial enormity to the economy. The achievements of the fintech start-ups has encored into this year with many start-ups that are organized raising seed capitals from venture capitalists.

OnePipe, a start-up fintech API firm got into the elite of fintech players by raising $3.5Million seed round to expand on its embedded finance offering. African Impact focused VC Atlantica Ventures was involved in OnePipe’s $950,000 pre-seed round last year. They also participated in the seed raising round with Tribe Capital and V&R associates.

New investors Canaan Partners, Saison Capital, Norrsken Capital. The Fund and Two Culture Cap also participated. Existing investors Chris Adelsbach, Techstars, Ingressive Capital, Acquitty, P1, Raba and DFS lab also took part in the seed funding.

The fintech start-up Onepipe has opened the fintech’s space by offering an in depth innovation. The caveat of the fintech’s industry is collaboration, and Onepipe stood apart in the service it offers which is the embedded finance.

According to the CEO of OnePipe Ope Adeoye, ” The caveat goes like this the moment you make a positioning play for banking as a service, all you really need is one partner bank that lets you go deep because the embedded finance offering is about depth and not breadth.”

He also affirmed,” If you go for data aggregation or open banking in general then you are going for breadth, not depth. So on our side, we said we’d rather go with tier two and tier three bands, where once you describe the concept to them they get it. It powers their growth and is more valuable to them, unlike other larger financial institutions.”

OnePipe monitors and supervises businesses API infrastructure and assist them in monetizing it. He also reiterated,” We raised a round last year to focus on one use case of the partnership, which was to pull together the APIs of a fixed set of banks and offer embedded banking as a service play, meaning we make it possible for non-financial institutions or businesses in general, to offer banking services for their customers.”

The embedded finance model of OnePipe has made it possible for 6.3million transactions worth over $46.3Million. It has 1million individuals accounts, and over 138 businesses. OnePipe gets commission from the transactions on these accounts.

The founding partners of Atlantical Ventures, Aniko Szigetvari, that took part in the seed funding asserted that OnePipe is making financial inclusion easy in the country and continent. He also said, ” In our view, embedded finance is the next enabler for both traditional and financial service businesses to increase customer loyalty and revenue by offering a wide range of third-party financial products and revenue streams for their customers.”

The strategic alliances of OnePipe is commendable considering the population strength of the continent, partnership route is the best way to cover forgotten market digital space.

Adeoye opined, ” We made sure that before we looked into other African countries, we were going in with a customer on the ground already.” He also said, “We did a deal with Sendy that made them participate in the round, and we will then deploy the capital for expansion. So as they go to Egypt, South-Africa, we’ll be deploying with them and grow together.”