Egypt’s first network of angel investors announced its investment on June 12 of an undisclosed amount in Nigerian fintech company CredPal, according to a statement sent to TechCabal.
Cairo Angels’ investment, its first in a Nigerian company, was made through the Cairo Angels Syndicate Fund (CASF), a micro venture capital fund that invests between $100,000 and $250,000 in post-seed and pre-series A startups across the Middle East and Africa.
Launched in 2018 by CEO Fehintolu Olaogun and COO Olorunfemi Jegede, CredPal allows businesses and individuals to make purchases in installments across online and offline merchants by providing them with instant access to credit in a process known as buy now, pay later (BNPL). CredPal says that it serves over 85,000 active customers and works with more than 4,000 active merchants, and that customers can use the service for transactions from ₦2,000 up to ₦5 million. CredPal also provides consumers with credit cards to access credit faster and more efficiently.
In making this CredPal investment, Cairo Angels joins the likes of Y-Combinator, Google, and Greenhouse Capital. According to its website, Cairo Angel has invested $2.8 million into 28 startups across 6 African and Middle East cities.
A pioneer in the African BNPL space, CredPal has raised a total of $16.7 million in funding per Crunchbase data, including $1.5 million to roll out its credit cards in 2020, and $15 million this March in a bridge round comprising equity and debt to expand its consumer credit offerings to other key markets namely Egypt, Kenya, Ghana, and Cameroon.
This investment also shows the BNPL frenzy is waxing strong on the continent, likely because African consumers have long struggled to access efficient and sustainable credit solutions. This has led to the launch and success of BNPL solutions across the continent like Lipa Later and M-Kopa in Kenya; PayJustNow in South Africa; and CDCare and Carbon, also in Nigeria.
“This support from Cairo Angels Syndicate Fund reinforces our mission to improve the quality of life of Africans through easy access to consumer credit. My co-founder and I are very pleased to have them as investment partners and can’t wait for how much we’ll achieve together,” Olaogun said in a statement.
“We couldn’t be more proud of our investment in CredPal, which is our first investment in Nigeria. Fehintolu and Olorunfemi have built an incredible FinTech platform that provides credit to thousands of underserved individuals and businesses in Africa and will be expanding rapidly to other key markets, including Egypt.” Cairo Angels Syndicate Fund CEO Aly El Shalakany said in a statement. “BNPL has proven to be a successful business model that is a compelling alternative to traditional forms of consumer credit, especially in emerging and frontier markets where credit card penetration is very low and usually unavailable to the masses.”
