Kenyan Fintech Startup Alvin Raises $740K Pre-seed Funding

Kenyan fintech startup Alvin has raised $740,000 pre-seed funding to hire a new team and scale its operations in Kenya.

The startup which was founded in May last year and launched its flagship product, the Alvin App v1 Labrador private beta helps people align their daily spending with their savings goals. It features automated expense tracking for M-Pesa, and the ability to create a budget in just two minutes, showing users how much they can spend on different things.

The pre-seed round was led by Nigerian venture capital firm, Ingressive Capital and featured Future Africa and Voltron Capital. Others include the CEO of Paystack Shola Akinlade, the former CEO of Dondé Tony Nicalo, East Africa-focused VC Zephyr Acorn, B2B SaaS-focused US seed fund Forum Ventures and UAE-based consultancy Tahseen Consulting. Angel investors from Kenya and the United States also participated in the round.

While commenting on the announcement, Alvin’s CEO Winston Reid said, “We’re excited to have such mission-aligned partners and strategic angels onboard the Alvin journey to help us build an ever more intuitive and powerful personal finance app for all of Africa faster and more efficiently. This capital will enable us to hire key personnel quickly and scale faster as we transition from the private beta stage of the Alvin App v1: Labrador to the first public version of Alvin later in the quarter,” he said.

According to Wiston, the app will help “Millions of Africans who struggle to save long enough because it is still too difficult to know where one’s money is going (making it easier for a person to overspend), and hardly enough guidance readily available on how to get from wherever you are today to where you need to be in order to buy that plot of land, or that first car/etc., debt-free”.

The Alvin app will launch publicly in Kenya in the next few months.