When Team Apt, a startup specialising in digital financial solutions, rebranded to Moniepoint in early 2023, it was processing $10 billion in transactions monthly for more than 400,000 businesses. Today, Moniepoint processes over 800 million transactions valued at $17 billion monthly for 10 million businesses and individuals.
It is also Nigeria’s newest unicorn after raising $110 million in equity financing, led by Development Partners International’s African Development Partners (ADP) III fund and with participation from Google’s Africa Investment Fund, Verod Capital, and Lightrock.
According to the Financial Times, Moniepoint had previously raised $55 million, and its valuation has now reached at least $1 billion.
The Fintech joins Interswitch, Opay, Flutterwave, and Andela in the exclusive unicorn club. This capital raise comes despite a slowdown in African startup funding. In 2023’s first three quarters, African startups raised $1.4 billion—a 38 percent decline from the same period last year.
The Beginnings
TeamApt was founded in 2015 by Tosin Eniolorunda and Felix Ike, former Interswitch employees, to provide infrastructure and payment solutions for banks. It arrived on the Nigerian tech scene at a time when new fintech startups were novel. Paystack (acquired by Stripe) was founded in 2015, and Flutterwave the year after, competing with incumbents like Interswitch (founded in 2002) and eTranzact (founded in 2003).
The startup offered a range of digital tools to streamline banking processes, including automation, reconciliation, and end-to-end transaction support.
Its focus on business-to-business (B2B) solutions helped it gain traction with minimal marketing expenses. “In B2B solutions, you don’t need so much money to close deals. In B2C, you need to do marketing, go out, and make noise. For us, it was more of showing the banks the problem they had and how we could solve it,” Tosin Eniolorunda told Business Insider in 2023.
By 2016, TeamApt launched its first digital point of sales (PoS) acquiring solution, which banks quickly adopted. Within two years, the startup reached seven-figure revenue and expanded to serve 100,000 businesses and three million customers, processing $160 million in monthly transactions.
Read also: Moniepoint raises $110m to become Africa’s latest unicorn
Entering Consumer Market with Moniepoint
In 2019, Moniepoint was launched as a service aimed at Nigeria’s underbanked population. It grew rapidly, with 30,000 registered agents handling 23 million monthly transactions worth almost N400 billion. Inspired by this success, TeamApt shifted its focus in 2021 from banking solutions to consumer and business products. Moniepoint’s agent network expanded 900 percent to 50,000, and the company soon became Nigeria’s largest non-bank mobile money operator by transaction value.
Eniolorunda said, “We had a lot of success in working with banks. However, we have identified some unique opportunities to empower underserved individuals and businesses with products designed to make it easier to access and manage their money more efficiently.”
Becoming Moniepoint
In 2022, TeamApt obtained a microfinance bank licence and named it Moniepoint Microfinance Bank. In a LinkedIn post in November 2022, Eniolorunda shared that Moniepoint was processing transactions worth $10 billion for more than 400,000 businesses monthly.
By the start of 2023, TeamApt shed its name and became Moniepoint. Eniolorunda said, “When we started in 2015, we were primarily providing back-office payment infrastructure for banks and needed an apt team, hence the name TeamApt.
“Since then, we have evolved significantly, and our flagship business banking solution, Moniepoint, has become our core focus and where we see the future.”
After dominating the Point of Sale (PoS) market in Nigeria, alongside OPay and Palmpay, it expanded into retail banking, launching a consumer app and debit card available to its 33 million terminal users in the third quarter of 2023.
Moniepoint’s entry into personal banking spurred a 2,000 percent growth in personal finance customers and a 150 percent increase in revenue.
The number which Moniepoint app installs on the Google Play Store grew from over one million in August 2023 to over five million in October 2024.
Ope Adeyemi, senior vice president for channels and sales tools at Moniepoint, noted in 2023, “We have always been committed to providing financial happiness, so it was a natural next step when dealing with so many businesses, to also offer our reliable services to their customers and employees.
“Over 33 million Nigerians use our terminals monthly, providing a solid foundation for this development. It’s only fair that we provide our banking services to the customers and employees of these businesses by providing reliable, best-in-class banking solutions for these personal users,” stated Eniolorunda.
Also, the startup launched Working Capital Loans, a solution targeted at the two million businesses on its platform to help solve capital challenges and keep their businesses running and growing. The loans are short—to medium-term, which means borrowers are expected to pay within seven to 120 days, which can be easily and, in some cases, automatically renewed.
The startups recently said about the SME space, “We are providing essential financial solutions that solve some of this sector’s problems. ”
It recently noted that as much as 30 percent of informal businesses on its platform could access loans for the first time through it.
The startup now operates three core products: Moniepoint (agency banking), Monnify (online payment gateway), and a personal banking service. With over 640,000 mobile money agents as of August 2023, Moniepoint has become the go-to payment provider for informal businesses.
Across various channels, Moniepoint processed an average of 433 million monthly transactions in 2023, closing the year with 5.2 billion transactions valued at $150 billion—an increase of 205 percent from 2022, according to TechCabal.
Read also: Is the future informal? – Key takeaways from the Moniepoint informal economy report
Funding and Future Expansion
Moniepoint, which recently won the best bank for SMEs at BusinessDay’s Banks and other Financial Institutions (BAFI) Awards, noted that this capital raise will help it to expand services to other African markets and build an integrated platform to provide businesses with digital payments, banking, foreign exchange, credit, and business management tools.
“The opportunities that exist in Nigeria also exist in multiple countries,” Eniolorunda told the Financial Times on Tuesday. “They are at different scales and levels of development. Some countries are 10 to 15 years behind Nigeria, and very few are ahead. We are looking at options in our toolkit and finding which ones would be the best to launch into a country, and that’s the work we’re doing right now.”
Tosin Adefolarin Ogunsanya, partner at Development Partners International, added, “A profitable business led by an excellent leadership team with clear strategic vision, Moniepoint is well positioned to continue its impressive growth trajectory while driving financial inclusion for underserved businesses and individuals across Africa.”