Lagos, Nigeria 11 November 2021 – Ingressive Capital invests in a resilient early-stage startup, Aboki Africa despite the ongoing threats and structural challenges against Fintechs in Nigeria. Just recently, threats directed at one of the most popular platforms collating the black market foreign exchange rates in the country by one of the largest bodies governing financial institutions in the country resulted in the temporary suspension of publishing rates on all its platforms.
However, this $10 Million venture capital fund, Ingressive Capital whose interest lies in targeting, supporting and funding tech-enabled businesses within the African continent choose to support Aboki Africa as the company has shown to have a strong head start and a resilient structure in this competitive market.
Aboki Africa launched in June 2020 with a primary goal of helping Nigerians change foreign currencies but the founders of the company started to see how difficult it could get for Nigerians to receive foreign currencies from their international counterparts. Though this startup is very new in Africa’s Tech-Ecosystem, they have shown resistance and rapid growth in their operations. Shortly after Ingressive invested in them, they rolled out a new service that will allow users to own virtual international bank accounts with ease and at no cost at all.
Femi Aghedo, the co-founder /COO, said, ” We built Aboki Africa out of necessity. I have had personal experiences with the pain points we are trying to alleviate. People who work and do business remotely should not have to jump through hoops to receive payments. We are fixing that.”
Now, a number of people in the population receive funds through domiciliary accounts which are difficult to get, expensive to use and have a few restrictions. Receiving money or transactions in general also takes a decent amount of time, running from days into weeks. As the culture of work is shifting and organizations are beginning to hire talents across the globe, it has become a need to ensure that populations in developing countries like Africa are able to carry out transactions anywhere in the world.
Uwem Uwemakpan the VP, Fund Operations at Ingressive Capital, said;
“Nigeria boasts of a large population of creative and talented young people who are looking for and engaging in legitimate activities to earn their wages in foreign currency. You cannot also deny the fact that Covid-19 has forced companies all across the world to work remotely thus creating opportunities for young Nigerians and Africans at large. Ingressive’s investment in Aboki Africa further cements our belief that technology will help us lift African out of poverty and create numerous opportunities for the youths as well as freelancers, importers and exporters, traders, manufacturers, etc. to easily exchange forex as well as seamlessly create foreign accounts to collect payments.”
Africa’s fintech industry is rapidly growing with more and more innovators emerging. However, scaling in the ecosystem is rare and extremely difficult. Ingressive Capital has always played a significant role in supporting the vision of early founders and now the company is synergising partnerships with well-recognised accelerators, like Ycombinator, TechStars, Google for Africa to ensure that rising startups can be well trained so as to connect with funders in the ecosystem sources to enable them scale.
