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Tag: Pivo

  • YC-backed fintech Pivo closes due to co-founder conflict

    YC-backed fintech Pivo closes due to co-founder conflict

    Pivo, a Nigerian digital bank for trade backed by YC and run by women, has shut down.

    Some African startups shut down in 2023 because of the lousy economy and a lack of funding. But Pivo is said to have shut down because of an ongoing conflict between the founders, according to people who know about the situation. 

    It was said that the fight between the founders, Nkiru Amadi-Emina (CEO) and Ijeoma Akwiwu (COO), hurt the company’s reputation, business relationships, culture, and team dynamics, which made it much harder for Pivo to raise money in the future.

    In May 2023, the company’s investors intervened. A memo from the meeting by reporters stated that the founders’ employment contracts and agreements would be replaced to address some issues. 

    “An operational Board of Directors should be established immediately to guide the company’s leadership and safeguard the investors’ investments,” the note said.

    Read also: Nigerian fintech startup Pivo raises $2 million in seed funding round

    They closed a year after raising $2 million in seed funding, a rare for an African, female-founded, and female-led startup. In 2022, African startups received 1.2% of global venture capital. Data from AVCA shows that only 13% of African startups that received funding had a female CEO, and only 7% received VC funding in 2022.

    Nkiru and Ijeoma bootstrapped Pivo for six months before raising funding. Pivo joined the summer Y Combinator 2022. The ODX accelerator program gave the company $125,000 for a 7% equity stake.

    Pivo Capital and Pivo Business were lending platforms and business banks, respectively, until the shutdown.

    In its seed round last year, Pivo Capital gave SMEs over $3 million with a 98% repayment rate. Pivo Business transaction volume increased by over 400% from April to September.

    Friends-turned-business partners

    In 2021, CEO Nkiru Amadi-Emina and COO Ijeoma Akwiwu founded Pivo. A birthday party introduced Amadi-Emina and Akwiwu six years earlier (2015). The pair founded the Abuja logistics company SourcePro based on their values. Their struggles inspired them to found Pivo, an African trade digital bank.

    “I trust Nkiru with decisions, so starting a business with her was easy. She has foresight and guts. “I make strategic, calculated decisions,” said Akwiwu in a first-half 2022 company blog interview. It seems we complement each other. After seeing and growing through too much, Pivo was the perfect next step.”

    A conflict between the duo may have started after the company announced its seed round in November 2022.

    A year ago, Moe Odele, founding partner of Vazi Legal, an African tech law firm, told the press that “About half of the issues we resolve for founders immediately after fundraising has to do with co-founders’ relationship—and this is a critical issue

    In a press interview last year, Pivo’s COO said she and her co-founder face work challenges despite being friends. Truthfully, every day is hard. Early on, Pivo set rules for how we should interact. Work issues are us versus the issue, not me versus you, “he said.

    Why was Pivo closed?

    Two years after the company launched, the founders fought. After the company announced its seed round in November 2022, it may have started. 

    Amadi-Emina ran another company while Pivo’s CEO, according to the information. She named Pivo’s secretary her brother, with whom she ran the other company. These angered co-founder Akwiwu, causing communication issues.

    While we are yet to confirm the part Akwiwu played in Pivo’s demise, what we know is that their feud and inability to reconcile led this promising startup down the path of destruction.

    As the conflict between the two intensified, Pivo’s investors intervened in May 2023 by laying down some guidelines for the company to continue to exist.

    As part of the decisions reached by the investors, it was agreed that Ijeoma would resign from her role as COO and receive compensation. This entailed her signing a separation agreement formalizing the conclusion of her association with the company.

    According to the investors’ memo, “The founders will devote their full business efforts and time exclusively to Pivo Inc., and shall not engage in any other business activities or ventures that may compete with or interfere with Pivo Inc.’s operations or interests.”

    The investors say these measures may only partially satisfy either co-founder. Without them, Pivo has no compelling future or a way to continue supporting the company or your future ventures, “the memo read. “Moving forward, the investors expect co-founders to treat each other respectfully and refrain from disparaging or publicly maligning one another, the company, or the investors.”

    Although intervened, a recent investor town hall meeting closed the company. The startup’s user transition is unclear.

  • Nigerian fintech startup Pivo raises $2 million in seed funding round

    Nigerian fintech startup Pivo raises $2 million in seed funding round

    Precursor Ventures, Vested World, Y Combinator, FoundersX, and Mercy Corp Ventures backed Pivo Africa in a $2 million seed round.

    Suppliers involved in complex supply chains, wholesale distributors, and SMEs can take advantage of Pivo’s all-in-one financial services platform.

    Founded in 2021, the company helps clients manage their cash flow with credit, transactions, and spending management. Pivo makes it easy for SMEs to make, collect, and monitor payments.

    Read also: SecondSTAX Partners with Ghana Stock Exchange, Nairobi Securities Exchange

    Pivo Africa raises capital to expand product offerings

    To enhance transaction management and payment reconciliation for supply chains, Pivo will utilize the funding to develop new products and modify current ones. For their client group’s normal recurring payments, the anticipated update will offer improved payment possibilities. Along with expanding operations to East Africa and expanding its personnel, the firm also wants to increase its footprint outside of its Lagos headquarters.

    “After our pre-seed round of $550,000 in Q1 of this year, we launched Pivo Business,” says CEO and co-founder Nkiru Amadi-Emina. Between April and September, Pivo Business transaction volume rose by 400%. We want to create supply chain anchor solutions with this money.

    Daniel Block, Investment Principal at Mercy Corps Ventures said, “When we first invested last year, we believed that the founders’ deep logistics industry expertise and commitment to unattended supply chain SMEs would enable Pivo to quickly carve out a deep moat in the competitive fintech lending space.”

    In North and Central Africa, Amadi-Emina introduced an on-demand delivery platform in 2017. Kobo360, one of the most well-known e-commerce players in Africa, purchased the platform.

    “As Pivo introduces new products to move from a pure fintech lender to a full-fledged financial services platform, we’re pleased to see the firm provide a comprehensive array of financial services,” Daniel Block says.

    Amadi-Emina and Ijeoma Akwiwu are Y Combinator’s first all-female team in Nigeria. “We smashed a barrier as a female-led startup.” “YC acknowledged us as entrepreneurs and demonstrated women can lead in tech,” said Amadi-Emina.

    Tech is male-dominated, and man-made hurdles prevent women from entering. Getting into YC means more people will see strong female representation from Nigeria. We hope a female entrepreneur somewhere sees us and realizes that if she works hard, applies herself, and has the data to back it up, she can accomplish her goals.

    BLNK Raises $32 Million for Instant Inclusive Consumer Credit in Egypt

    More about Pivo

    Pivo, which was founded in 2021 by Nkiru Amadi-Emina and Ijeoma Akwiwu, has supported the expansion of SMEs via secured working capital loans, asset financing, and trade finance solutions. Customers may also have transactional banking in the form of current smart accounts, payments, and basic accounting tools.

    It is intended for any company involved in the import, export, manufacturing, distribution, and retail of FMCG, logistics and haulage, and clearing and forwarding.

    The company’s three major products are as follows: Pivot Capital, the company’s core product, provides SMEs with loans up to $50,000. Meanwhile, Pivo Finance provides consumers with a digital-only banking solution, and Pivo Plus provides insurance, business compliance, and tax regulatory help.

  • 5 African Startups in Y Combinator’s Summer 2022 batch

    5 African Startups in Y Combinator’s Summer 2022 batch

    5 African startups have been accepted into the Y Combinator’s summer 2022 (YC S22) batch out of the 146 startups that applied.
    The accelerator behemoth initially announced the 4 startups chosen on its directory and later added 1 more to make it a total of 5. The S22 batch of the Y Combinator program, which was influential in the success of companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox, Coinbase, Etc., is taking place, and it concludes in September with a demo day.
    The accelerator also increased its standard deal size to $500,000. Previously it invested $125,000 per 7% equity, but now it has added and will invest $375,000 on an uncapped SAFE with “Most Favored Nation” (MFN) terms. This means that each startup will now be receiving $500,000 in funding.
    The previous accelerator, the W22 batch, had the most African representatives in its history, with 24 African startups participating, while the S22 batch already has 5 confirmed members from the 156 which applied. The 5 startups which have been confirmed for this program include:

    Pivo Technology

    Founding date: 2021
    Founders: Ijeoma Akwiwu and Nkiru Amadi-Emina
    This startup was created by 2 women who have had a lot of experience in running supply chain businesses which prompted them to launch Pivo technology to address the issue of powering supply chain SMEs by providing quick and flexible financing options, starting with lending.
    Their model is large when you notice that only SMEs contributed $250 billion to the African economy as of 2019. Since they have noticed this trend, they have decided to position themselves as a neobank providing services for traders in Africa.
    Actually, in the African space, the credit market already has a lot of big players, with Flutterwave being the biggest in the industry, but Pivo has focused on a more abandoned sub-niche, which is “lending in the supply chain sector”.
    To infiltrate the market, Pivo introduced a program called Pivo Capital, a credit-focused financial services platform to provide funds for supply chain SMEs. With the aid of Freight Carriers, Truck owners and drivers can use the platform to create a bank account and payment solutions for their business. They have also introduced new programs such as Invoice Factoring and Pivo Plus, designed for Insurance and corporate compliance offerings, but they are still in their testing stage.

    Read: Cartona Secures $12 Million in Funding

    Chowdeck

    Founding date: October 2021
    Founders: Femi Aluko, Lanre Yusuf, and Olumide Ojo
    This startup was founded by 2 major employees of Paystack, who held engineering roles, and Lanre Yusuf, the ex-engineering lead at Crown Interactive. They are presently based in Lagos, Nigeria, which is Africa’s most populous city with over 20 million residents in the city. The company has a variety of restaurants on the platform, which enables the user to choose from any of their choices and order any local or International dish that will be delivered to them in a nick of time.
    The company has stated that the variety of restaurants it hosts on its platform has assured it (Chowdeck) of exposure and growth to more countries. The companies also pride themselves on being a startup birthed to fix the problem of food orders due to the massive change in consumer behaviour towards it.
    Due to some factors, most residents of Lagos have changed their approach to food services, which was the major factor in Chowdeck’s massive growth as most of the populace decided to try out other platforms aside from the popular ones. In the 1st Quarter of 2022, the startup has claimed to have delivered over 60,000 meals in only 6 months, from January to June.

    Patika

    Founding date: 2021
    Founders: Phelix Juma and Sidney Rema
    Patika, which is a fintech startup, was created by 2 Kenyans with the motive and aim to help provide smaller businesses with the capacity to track customer debt, facilitate repayments and manage cash flow to aid their business. It is the only startup enrolled in the Y Combinator’s summer batch, not from the West African region but from the eastern side of Africa.
    The Co-founder and CTO, Phelix Juma, has described the startup as the solution to eradicate the traditional methods of debt tracking and repayments monitoring, which according to him, was the reason over 60% of debts weren’t repaid on time, which caused a loss of $2000 to businesses affected.
    In a statement on LinkedIn, Juma wrote:
    “We are automating previously manual processes like phone call-based repayments reminders, billings, payments, and reconciliations with a vision to grow into a full-stack neobank for Africa’s small businesses”.
    According to the latest statistics from the Kenyan National Bureau of Statistics, over 1000 SMEs die daily due to inadequate bookkeeping despite contributing 45.5% of Kenya’s gross domestic product and employing 86% of the Kenyan population.
    The introduction of Patika alongside new products would help SMEs grow and scale and access credit and full business automation software.

    Garage Mobility

    Founding date: 2021
    Founders: Cedric Foudjet and Gwanygha’a Gana
    Based in Accra, this startup aims to get motor parts from top sellers and distributors worldwide and process an efficient supply chain system that directly delivers these parts to retailers. According to Gana, the startup was birthed out of personal experience as the people of his hometown in Cameroon bought motor parts at exorbitant prices, which brought about disconnection in the supply chain. He aims to fix this problem with Garage Mobility.

    Moneco

    Founding date: 2022
    Founders: Bilal Dahlab, Shams Radjabaly, and Kuassi Jimmy Kumako.
    This new startup focus is a neo bank that focuses majorly on migrants in Europe. They claim to have a social impact spin on their business model, which will make banking more seamless and affordable to underserved communities in Europe. They are the only startup accepted into Y Combinator the same year they began operations. The company in the long term looks to be a one-stop shop where all users can have their financial needs solved.

    Y Combinator has proven to be one of the top investors in Africa as they have been mentioned various times investing in one platform or the other but have been rewarded immensely as they gave birth to some big companies we know. This Summer 2022 batch will be no different as it aims to equip startups with resources to become top players in their industries.