Kuda Bank, the London-based, Nigerian-operating startup that is taking on incumbents in the country with a mobile-first, personalised and often cheaper set of banking services built on newer, API-based infrastructure, has been on a growth tear in the last several months, and to fuel its expansion, it has now raised another round of funding. The funding was made at a valuation of $500 million, and it comes on the back of some impressive early growth for the startup. Kuda now has 1.4 million registered users, which is more than double the number it had in March when it had 650,000 registered users — a figure it revealed when announcing its Series A of $25 million led by Valar Ventures.
Equity rounds raised in quick succession, sometimes just months apart, seems to be the order of the day now, fuelled in part by a lot of money being pumped into venture now, but also by the state of the market. When the company in question is showing all the right growth metrics and is working in a particularly buzzy area, many will strike when the iron is hot. Neobanks — fintechs building a new generation disruptive of banking services based around more modern interfaces and infrastructure based around the concept of API-driven embedded finance — have been one of these areas, growing at a rate of nearly 50% annually in terms of revenues and projected to be collectively a $723 billion market by 2028. Kuda’s initial business model was built around providing banking services to people who still also held accounts with incumbent banks: People would have their salaries paid into their old accounts and then transferred out to be spent and used in other ways via their Kuda accounts.