Nala Raises $40 Million In Series A Funding

African remittance startup, Nala, has raised $40 million in what is now one of the largest Series A transactions in Africa. The funding is aimed at supporting its global expansion and enhance the reliability of payments to Africa by developing its payment rails. This new capital injection follows a $10 million seed in 2022.

The oversubscribed funding round was led by San Francisco-based VC firm Acrew Capital, with participation from DST Global, Norrsken22, HOF Capital, and existing investors including Amplo and NYCA Partners. A number of angel investors, including fintech founders Ryan King of Chime and Vlad Tenev of Robinhood made investments too.

The new funding will accelerate NALA’s global ambitions focusing on expanding beyond Africa and builsing Rafiki, its new B2B payments platform. Rafiki is designed to lay the payment rails for the next billion users, ensuring reliability, managing treasury directly, improving error mapping, reducing user costs, and streamlining payouts and collections. Similar to how dLocal revolutionized payments in Latin America and AirWallex transformed the Asian market, Rafiki is set to build a robust payment infrastructure for Africa.

The company enables people domiciled in the E.U, U.K, and U.S to send money across 249 banks and 26 mobile money services in 11 markets across Africa, through the Nala consumer app. Nala has integrated with mobile services like Kenya’s M-Pesa, remitters can pay bills directly into local mobile wallets.

According to Fernandes, the decision to add payment capabilities was informed by user requests of a 360-degree control of their money. The fintech plans to scale these offerings to the planned new markets, starting with Asia.

Nala is also doubling down on its B2B payments platform launched in March to serve global businesses making payments into and out of Africa.

“This $40 million funding round marks a pivotal moment for Nala. It will enable us to go beyond remittances and extend our reach beyond Africa, building a robust payments ecosystem. We’re reinvesting this money to enhance our infrastructure, ensuring reliable, low-cost payments for all. With the launch of our own payment rails and the expansion of our B2B platform Rafiki, we’re not just talking about change, we’re building it. We’ve got some bold, ambitious plans, give us a couple of years,” said Fernandes.

Fernandes launched Nala in 2017 initially to offer local money transfers in Tanzania but pivoted to enable foreign remittances in 2021.