OnePipe, a fintech API company with a unique offering, has joined other fintech API infrastructure players after obtaining $3.5 million in venture funding to expand its embedded finance offerings.
Among those that participated in this seed round were Tribe Capital, V&R Associates, and Atlantica Ventures, which was previously a key investor in OnePipe’s pre-seed round of $950,000 earlier this year.
Norrsken (Niklas Adalberth’s fund), The Fund, and Two Culture Cap were among the new investors. Acquity, P1, Raba and DFS Lab joined existing investors Chris Adelsbach and Techstars in making new investments.
Initial plans for OnePipe included developing an API gateway that would connect banks and fintechs using a common standard, allowing the company to execute essential open banking functions.
Once OnePipe had established agreements with a number of financial institutions, the company made the decision to take a step back and explore the area of embedded finance.
The same isn’t true for companies that offer embedded finance, unlike open banking and data aggregation. Currently, there are six banks on board as OnePipe’s financial partners.
Using OnePipe’s API platform, non-financial companies can launch and cross-sell a variety of financial services such as credit, accounts, and payments within their offers.
The fintech company raised a round of funding last year to focus on one use case of the relationship, which was to gather together the APIs of a defined set of banks and deliver embedded banking or banking as a service to customers. Non-financial institutions, or businesses in general, are able to offer banking services to their consumers as a result of its services. Customers can pay off their accounts and access credit when they need it by using OnePipe’s bank API.
OnePipe has handled more than 6.3 million transactions worth a total of $46.3 million in the ten months after switching to this model, based on the company’s statistics. From FMCG and retail to lending and agriculture, these data represent over 1 million individual accounts.
In exchange for processing transactions on these accounts, OnePipe receives a percentage of the proceeds, which it distributes to its partner banks. OnePipe takes at least 1% of the loan interest from its lending partners and divides it with businesses and partner banks.
For its expansion into additional African countries, OnePipe has entered into a strategic relationship with African logistics and freight firm Sendy, according to Adeoye. The company officials said they plan to form a “Stripe-Shopify-like tag group.”
The CEO explained that the company went into other African countries with a customer on the ground first. “We did a deal with Sendy that made them participate in this round, and we will then deploy the capital for expansion.” As they deploy to Egypt and South Africa, Onepipe is sure it will involve and observe from them.
