Pngme has announced that it has raised an additional $15 million in a Series A funding round. The funding round was spearheaded by Octopus Ventures, and it comes less than 12 months since its $3 million seed-funding round.
According to the announcement, the funds will be used to achieve the firm’s mission of enabling access to finance by developing the required infrastructure and implementing machine learning frameworks. The funds will also be used to mark a new phase of growth for the firm.
Funds to Increase Human Capacity
In the announcement, the firm also mentioned that part of the funding would expand its executive team. It will hire Lorraine Kageni Maina as the Chief Strategy Officer, while Nick Masson will be appointed Chief Technology Officer.
Lorraine has worked in different capacities across banking and technology sectors at a corporate level in the Sub-Saharan region. On the other hand, Masson has experience in enterprise-scale engineering and will improve Pngme’s technological capacity.
Besides expanding its executive team, Pngme will also be part of the funds to expand its global teams in various divisions such as data science, product, sales and engineering teams. This will meet the increased demand from different departments such as credit bureaus, fintechs, neo banks and more.
Scaling to Meet Demand
Commenting on this announcement, Brendan Playford, the CEO of Pngme, stated that, “With the demand, we are seeing in our core market, and from financial institutions globally, it is clear we are solving a major pain point by building financial data infrastructure and machine learning-as-a-service. With this fresh injection of capital, we are not only scaling up our data processing and machine learning capabilities but also building a robust team that can deliver on our mission of financial inclusion.”
In the announcement, the firm also stated that they were pleased to have collaborated with Octopus Ventures and that they would work with the team and gain expertise from industry experts.
Other firms that are participated in the funding round include EchoVC, Aruwa Capital, Lateral Capital Management, Two Small Fish Ventures, the 51, Raptor Group and other companies.