Anchor, a Nigerian banking-as-a-service fintech startup has secured $1 million in pre-seed funding aimed at attracting best talents, improve the company’s tech infrastructure, invest in compliance and regulatory infrastructure, and acquire customers. The funding round was led by Byld Ventures, Y Combinator, Luno Expeditions, Niche Capital, Mountain Peak Capital, and angel investors such as SeamlessHR, CEO Emmanuel Okeleji. Co-founder and CEO of Anchor, Segun Adeyemi, commented: “After months of building and talking to our early customers, we are excited to be coming out of private beta and launching our public beta with a pre-seed round led by Byld Ventures. “Also, we got into Y Combinator Summer 2022 batch as the first banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform from Africa. At Anchor, we provide API and tools for businesses to create accounts, transfer funds, offer savings, issue cards, and do more for their customers. This enables them to grow revenues by offering and embedding financial services within their products.” The startup, which was co-founded by Segun Adeyemi, Olamide Sobowale, and Gbekeloluwa Olufotebi in 2021,provides APIs, dashboards, and tools that help developers embed and build banking products such as bank accounts, funds transfers, savings products, issuing cards, and offering loans. Speaking on the company’s solutions, Adeyemi said: “We’re now seeing a new development where businesses want to offer different products and financial services beyond just payments. We strongly believe that the way is not just by latching banking-as-a-service on a payments platform, but there has to be proper banking as a service platform built with the right infrastructure and go-to-market strategy. That’s the problem we decided to solve as a team, basically the full end-to-end infrastructure for startups to be able to build, embed, and launch financial services.”
