Nigerian emerging markets neobank, Canza Finance has announced the completion of its $3.27M seed round led by Fenbushi Capital, with participation from Dominance Ventures, Bixin Ventures, Consensys, Protocol Labs, Emergo Ventures, MEXC Global, NGC Ventures, XanPool, Hashkey, the founders of Celo, and others.
Canza which is building the world’s largest non-institutional-based financial system will deploy the funding to continue headcount growth and expand its service offering in Nigeria and other growth regions including South America and Asia.
Oyedeji Oluwoye, CoFounder and CTO of Canza Finance, commented, “Today, we stand at a critical juncture in the journey to democratizing finance, with Nigeria emerging at the vanguard of crypto adoption globally. Against a backdrop of high inflation, financial instability, and barriers to access to traditional financial services, sub-Saharan Africa’s underdeveloped financial infrastructure has made the region a perfect vector for decentralized finance — according to a 2021 report by KPMG, more than 1 in 3 Nigerian adults are excluded from traditional finance. Our vision is to become leaders in decentralized finance and to spearhead this movement to offer financial freedom to millions of individuals. The tremendous interest and backing of our investors and strategic partners will enable us to grow the world-class Canza team, improve our security and most importantly take a definitive leadership position in our target markets.”
Established in 2020, Canza relies on a robust network of experienced local money market players to distribute financial and transaction-based services to users in Sub-Saharan African countries. Canza’s seamless crypto on/off-ramp services enable a wide range of DeFi services including staking, P2P, and cross-border settlements—aiming to contribute to the creation of an innovative and fully decentralized financial system. Canza is a member of Celo’s Alliance for Prosperity, an ecosystem of 140+ mission-aligned organizations including nonprofits, merchants, and payment processors fostering social impact using the Celo blockchain. Today, Canza has over 7,000 Celo wallets created via the USSD DApp with weekly transactions averaging over $200,000.
“The rate of cryptocurrency adoption in high-growth markets—in particular Africa—not only signals growing excitement for this new digital economy, but the advance of real-world use cases,” said Bo Shen, Managing Partner at Fenbushi Capital, “This traction, combined with Sub-Saharan Africa’s market, social and community conditions, uniquely positions it as an environment where a project like Canza will thrive.”
Colin Evran, Ecosystem Lead at Protocol Labs, commented, “Canza is a shining example of the power of the Filecoin Launchpad Accelerator to transform promising early-stage projects into high-growth businesses on the brink of making a huge impact in developing markets and Web3 ecosystem. Given the early traction of Canza, we are delighted to help expand access to Web3 technologies like decentralized identity tools and KYC options to the sub-Saharan Africa region. We’re excited to help the next cohort of African innovators turn their visions for Web 3.0 into reality.”
