Brass, a Nigerian fintech startup, providing financial services to small and medium businesses in Africa’s largest economy has secured a $1.7 million funding round to scale its operations, support local entrepreneurs, traders and fast-growing businesses.
Founded in July 2020 by Sola Akindolu and Emmanuel Okeke. Brass offers a series of products tailored to address the needs of small businesses. For instance, it offers credit and payment services, payroll and expense management, API support, cash-flow analytics, team and contact management, other core business services such as POS, debit and credit cards — all wrapped around a business bank account.
“There are many ways money can get out of the business, be it payroll, vendor payment, invoicing. We want to support businesses’ cash flow; we want to support them in those areas to make sure that money keeps running and they can keep growing their business,” Akindolu said, describing Brass’ application. “So that’s, for the most part, what we’re doing with Brass today: financial operations and cash flow support.”
Of all the services it offers, Brass believed its Brass Capital, which provides working capital and software services to businesses, will edge other offerings in the long run. Within the first six months of launching its beta, Brass Capital disbursed more than $2 million in credit to customers.
It presently has over 5,000 customers ranging from schools and malls to restaurants and fintechs such as Eden and Mono, which use its complete banking solution. And unlike other platforms, Brass is trying to optimize its platform for different levels of businesses with varying needs at the same time.
“What we’ve set out to do is to build stacks of financial operation services. We may be overkill for a micro business; they might not find us useful, so we’re more concerned about small and medium-sized businesses.”
The fundraising was led by pan-African VC firm Ventures Platform. Other investors include Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, Paystack co-founder Ezra Olubi, Hustle Fund, Acuity Ventures and Uncovered Fund.
