Nigeria’s Mono raises millions to power the internet economy in Africa
In February, Nigerian fintech startup Mono announced its acceptance into Y Combinator and, at the time, it wanted to build the Plaid for Africa. Three months later, the startup has a different mission: to power the internet economy in Africa and has closed $2 million in seed investment towards that goal.
The investment comes nine months after the company raised $500,000 in pre-seed last September and two months after receiving $125,000 from YC. Mono’s total investment moves up to $2.625 million, and investors in this new round include Entrée Capital (one of the investors in Kuda’s seed round), Kuda co-founder and CEO Babs Ogundeyi; Gbenga Oyebode, partner at TCVP; and Eric Idiahi, co-founder and partner at Verod Capital. New York but Africa-based VC Lateral Capital also invested after taking part in Mono’s pre-seed.
Alexander O. Onukwue
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Nigerian financial data startup Mono has raised a seed round of $2 million from a number of investors including Entrée Capital and Lateral Capital.
Babs Ogundeyi, co-founder and CEO of Kuda; Gbenga Oyebode, partner at The Continent Venture Partners; and Eric Idiahi, co-founder and partner at Verod Capital, also invested according to TechCrunch.
Mono was founded in 2020 by Abdul Hassan, a former product manager at Paystack, and Prakhar Singh. The company’s technology enables businesses and individuals to gain access to financial information, such as account statements, stored at commercial banks. Mono is one of out a number of startups creating open banking solutions in Nigeria.
Dark web based drug racket busted in Bhopal, MDMA, LSD seized
Dark web based drug racket busted in Bhopal, MDMA, LSD seized
This is the first time that a high-tech drug racket operated operating from the dark web has been busted in Bhopal.
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UPDATED: February 25, 2021 18:21 IST
With the arrest of three persons, the Bhopal Police has busted a high-tech drug racket that used the dark web to distribute drugs. Police have seized MDMA and LSD worth Rs 10 lakh from the three men.
Police sources said that they had been receiving information about a drug racket that was being operated anonymously. Accordingly, a team from the Piplani police was deputed to crack the ring. According to police, the accused have been identified as Prakhar Singh, Ayush Manwani, and Ritwik Kaushal- all of them are engineers.
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American startup accelerator Y Combinator (YC) will have 36 startups participating in its winter 2021 programme. One of the African startups in the group is Mono, a Nigerian fintech building APIs for open banking and simplified financial accounts management.
Mono was founded by Abdulhamid Hassan and Prakhar Singh. They launched the company in August 2020 and a month later, closed a pre-seed round of $500,000. Lateral Capital, Rally Cap Ventures, Golden Palm Investment, and Ventures Platform invested in that round.
After leaving a product manager role at Paystack in 2019, Hassan joined Voyance, a data science company. He and Singh identified a gap; Nigerian digital businesses found it difficult sourcing financial data about their customers from banks.
Mono, a startup that wants to build Plaid for Africa, gets backing from Y Combinator
Prakhar Singh and ex-Paystack employee Abdul Hassan have known each other for seven years, building different tech products individually and collectively along the way.
Before joining Paystack in 2018, Hassan co-founded payments startup OyaPay the year before. After leaving the Stripe-owned company in 2019, he launched a data startup called Voyance where Singh, who had already exited one of his products Transferpay.ng, an offline payments startup was a software engineer.
Last June, the duo started working on Mono, a project that would allow companies to access their customers’ financial accounts in Nigeria.