Kenya’s mobile digital bank, Branch, has raised $9.2 million in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz as well as seed investors Khosla Impact and Joe Lonsdale’s Formation 8 second fund. According to Branch CEO, Matt Flannery, the money will help Branch’s team of six in San Francisco and more than 30 in Kenya expand into a second country, Tanzania, then launch in Uganda later this year.
Branch is a for-profit socially conscious company based in San Francisco and Nairobi. They use technology to dramatically reduce the cost of delivering financial services in emerging markets.
Its first product is credit. Branch eliminates the challenges of getting a loan by using the data on your phone to create a credit score. A user downloads the Branch app from the Google Playstore and they then sign up using their Facebook account. Its machine learning algorithms process thousands of data points to assess your credit profile and create tailored loan products. Data includes
- Handset Details
- SMS Logs
- Social Network Data
- GPS Data
- Call logs
- Contact lists
That data will allow Matt Flannery and his team to offer bigger and longer term loans over time, from a few dollars up to $500 loans paid back over a year.
Flannery says the new funding should allow Branch to collect enough data that it will be able to raise such large sums of money without giving up equity soon. “We predicted we’d make 5,000 loans to test it last year, and we made several hundred thousand.”
To date, the company has raised a total of $10.8 Million.
