Kenyan fintech startup Alvin has raised a $740,000 pre-seed funding round led by Nigerian venture capital firm, Ingressive Capital.
Other participants in the round included the CEO of Paystack Shola Akinlade, the former CEO of Dondé Tony Nicalo, East Africa-focused VC Zephyr Acorn, the B2B SaaS-focused US seed fund Forum Ventures, leading African VCs Future Africa and Voltron Capital, and UAE-based consultancy Tahseen Consulting. Angel investors from Kenya and the United States also participated in the round.
The startup also disclosed that it will be participating in Forum Ventures’s W22 accelerator batch to help it expedite its road to scale in January 2022.
Currently, in its private beta phase, Alvin is an intuitive personal finance app for Africa that helps people align their daily spending with their savings goals. The startup was founded in May last year and launched its flagship product, the Alvin App v1 Labrador private beta. It features
automated expense tracking for M-Pesa, and the ability to create a budget in just two minutes, showing users how much they can spend on different things.
Speaking to Disrupt Africa, Alvin’s CEO Winston Reid said he and his co-founders founded the startup to solve a problem they and their peers were coming across on a regular basis.
“The only personal finance apps we could find in Kenya were not optimised for the local context, offered no guidance to help us acquire the assets we wanted to save toward, and only offered the ability to save but give no daily support to help us save for goals that require consistency for long periods of time,” he said.
The startup plans to use the new capital injection to hire a new team and scale its operations including expanding to Nigeria in the latter half of 2022.
“We’re excited to have such mission-aligned partners and strategic angels onboard the Alvin journey to help us build an even more intuitive and powerful personal finance app for all of Africa faster and more efficiently. This capital will enable us to hire key personnel quickly and scale faster as we transition from the private beta stage of the Alvin App v1: Labrador to the first public version of Alvin later in the quarter.” Wiston said.
Alvin plans to publicly launch its app in Kenya in the next few months.
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