NALA, a Tanzanian cross-border payments company, has raised a $10 million seed round led by Amplo. It recently pivoted from local to international money transfers.

This new financing round was joined by Accel and Bessemer Partners, including local investors like DFS Lab.

NALA also received funds from angel investors including Jonas Templestein, Vladimir Tenev, Alex Bouaziz; Laura Spiekerman, Peeyush Ranjan, and early employees at Revolut and TransferWise.

Founded in 2017 by Benjamin Fernandes, NALA is an application that acts as an interface on top of the mobile money payment systems that allows the user to make transfers, payments, and transactions seven times faster, without data connectivity.

In 2019, NALA built a mobile money service in East Africa and scaled it to more than 250,000 users. However, in 2021, NALA started testing international money transfers after some users expressed interest in moving money from the U.K. to East African countries (Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania), thus ushering the Tanzanian fintech into the remittance business.

Since then, NALA has achieved considerable growth since testing out the product last year. The platform allows payments from the U.K. to Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Ghana. And in the past six months, more than 8,000 customers have moved over eight figures in transaction volume to Africa.

Commenting, CEO Benjamin Fernandes said: “Our core customer base is the diaspora right now who live in the U.K. This is the customer we’re currently serving today as we speak. We also got our license approvals to go live in the U.S. and the E.U., which will be going live in a month and a half in at least one other E.U. country, probably France.”

The chief executive also said NALA, currently present in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Ghana, and South Africa, plans to be live in 12 African countries by the end of the year, including Nigeria.

“We’re scaling that up, not just being in Tanzania and Kenya and Uganda as a consumer-facing product. But in the long run, we want to build infrastructure across the continent where we can do outbound from the continent and allow people to send money back. We’ve submitted our remittance license application in Kenya, as well as Uganda, for us to be able to do this the other way around,” said the founder.

As part of its user acquisition and retention efforts, NALA will be launching a crowdfunding campaign this year where its first users will get access to own some shares.  

“We don’t want to be compared to a regular remittance company, and people will do that naturally. But we think remittance is just the starting point for what we’re going to build,” said Fernandes. 

“My take is that payments across the continent is 1% built, and there’s a lot of infrastructure and software that needs to be built deeply. That’s where we want to sit and this $10 million round is going to do a lot of that.” 

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