Cardano Spearheads $11M Investment In Africa’s Embedded Finance

Cardano’s Charles Hoskinson announced that its parent firm, Input Output Global [IOG], participated in a pre-series A round of $11 million in support of a Kenyan fintech company called Pezesha, Africa. Hoskinson tweeted that the investment is intended to revolutionize Microfinance at the global level.

Apart from IOG, the financial round also had significant backing from Women’s World Banking Capital Partners II, Verdant Frontiers Fintech Fund, and cFund.

According to a TechCrunch report, small enterprises that contribute 90% of Africa’s trade are facing a deficit of $330 billion. This is where Pezesha hopes to fill the gap as it spread its wings into other regions of the African continent.

Founded in 2017 by entrepreneur Hilda Moraa, Pezesha boast of a scalable digital lending infrastructure where both traditional and non-traditional financial institutions offer working capital to MSMEs.

“The opportunity and impact in solving working capital problems for SMEs are huge. [We are] solving the root cause, which is information asymmetry issues, to ensure quality and responsible borrowing. Pezesha solves this through our robust API-driven credit scoring technology,” CEO Moraa, told TechCrunch.

Cardano Boss Termed Pezesha Funding As A Milestone

Terming the investment as an important milestone, Cardano and IOG’s co-founder Charles Hoskinson, said that blockchain and cryptocurrencies can play a key role in providing the movement of capital into emerging markets to support economic growth and job creation.

“Our vision is centered on using technology to make it easier for people across the globe to borrow and lend to each other in a regulated way. This investment in Pezesha is an important milestone, and we’re excited to be a part of their growth story,” he added.

The latest investment by the IOG into Pezesha comes close to the heels of an earlier announcement that the two entities had collaborated to build a peer-to-peer financial operating system for Africa.

In addition to that, EMURGO Africa and Cardano accelerator Adaverse recently unveiled the Blockchain Founders Hangout 2.0 event to discuss Web3 funding in Africa.

AdaVerse also invested an undisclosed amount into a seed funding round for AfriGuild, a blockchain gaming DAO that is on a mission to onboard 100 million Africans into Web3 over the next 5 years.