NIGERIA – BFREE, a Lagos-based fintech that focuses on improving consumers’ financial health through its tech-enabled credit management solution, has raised an undisclosed amount of seed round.
Beta Ventures, based in Nigeria, led the seed round, which also included Launch Africa Ventures and GreenHouse Capital.
“We are really excited to have incredibly supportive investors. We are now using this support to scale our product and development team and to pilot the Kenyan market,” Chukwudiebele Enyi, COO of BFREE, said.
BFREE’s platform uses a mix of self-servicing solutions, contact automation, and human operations, as well as machine learning algorithms to cluster and forecast customer behavior, to incentivize customers who have fallen behind on their credit repayments to clear their balances in a sustainable manner.
Lenders benefit from higher repayment rates, and borrowers benefit from a better customer experience.
“In the end, there are millions of consumers in personal debt in Africa, and no one is really focusing on helping them get back on their feet.”
Moses Nmor – CPO, BPFREE
“We are really excited to help grow the first ethical credit management company on the continent. Efficient and user-friendly credit collection is an essential part of the credit value chain. BFREE is essential for the existing credit market, and it opens the door for significant credit deepening in Africa and any other emerging market,” said Ike Eze of Beta Ventures.
“The team is highly experienced in lending and is now solving a problem that they once faced themselves, which is something that we like a lot in founders.”
Bunmi Akinyemiju, Founding Partner of GreenHouse Capital, explained why they invested saying that within a few months, BFREE has been launching product after product and now already achieves 60% of total collections via non-human activities, gradually taking the risk of human liability out of the collections process.
“They are innovating at a point in the lending value chain that has been broken and long ignored. Their goal is to make collections more efficient and data-driven, and this is the essence of the role of a tech startup,” he said.
Baljinder Sharma of Launch Africa said that BFREE is setting its eyes on East Africa next, where they see huge opportunities for their solution and a region where we can help it expand.
“As a leading pan-African specialist early-stage VC fund focused on venture-building through our global network of over 100 strategic C-suite advisors, mentors and investors, we knew we could add significant value to BFREE in their geographic expansion plans,” Sharma said.
CPO Moses Nmor, speaking about the startup’s business model, said that they focus all of their product development to assist customers in a state of financial emergency.
“This is really what motivates us as a team. In the end, there are millions of consumers in personal debt in Africa, and no one is really focusing on helping them get back on their feet. With BFREE, we are changing that,” he added.
BFREE was established in the summer of 2020 by Chukwudi Enyi, Moses Nmor, and Julian Flosbach. Lenders benefit from higher repayment rates, and borrowers benefit from a better customer experience, the company operates over 300,000 clients for the majority of Nigeria’s leading lenders.