Kenyan fintech startup Credrails raises Ksh.285M to expand across Africa

The company connects banks, mobile money, and offline financial data into one application programming interface (API) which is then exposed to other businesses for various uses such as lending analytics and Know Your Customer (KYC) services. 

“Think of us just the same way there are payment aggregators – they are people who help pay with bank cards, mobile money or with cash. We are a data aggregator for the continent,” Clara Wanjiku Odero, the start-up’s CEO and co-founder describes it.

The seed round saw the participation of investors such as SoftBank, Unicorn Growth, Samos Ventures and Precursor.

Launched in 2020, Credails currently has access to 250 million accounts in 33 countries across Africa and is working towards covering all of Africa.

Odero says that there is a need to improve the lack of banking infrastructure through “contextualizing” the data for banks, lending and payment companies which could profit from stitching together financial data.

“We are building the open banking infrastructure for Africa, we want to connect banks, mobile money, offline data into a single application programming interface that we then expose to businesses for other use cases,” she was quoted as saying by Bloomberg earlier this month.

“We’ve been building it up quietly with a core set of customers to make sure that everything works.”

Credrail says it has grown 400 percent month-on-month growth since its launch, and plans to enter five markets by the end of 2022. 

The firm has already set up physical operations in Nigeria.

“We are getting a lot of requests from customers as well from across markets, and we are using that to plan our growth,” said Odero.