Microtration invests in Pivo
In its first deal for the year, VC firm, Microtraction, has announced an investment in fintech startup Pivo, a financial platform for small and medium-sized businesses.
In a Medium post, the firm stated that it was excited to be on the journey with the founders as they work hard to bridge Africa’s supply chain financing gap.
Founded by Yele Bademosi in 2017, Microtraction provides funds for early-stage technical founders in Africa to help scale their business into companies. The firm accepts all-year applications to invest between $25k to $150k as pre-seed funds into outstanding African startups with the potential of becoming million-dollar companies.
Microtraction also provides professional and advisory services; as well as introduce startups to larger stage investors to aid navigation to other funding rounds or join world-class accelerators.
Microtraction has invested in startups such as Honeycoin, Wallet.ng, Schoolable, Cowrywise, BuyCoins, Bitsika, Lemonade Finance, and others.
Founded by Nkiru Amadi-Emina (CEO) and Ijeoma Jacquelyn Akwiwu (COO), Pivo offers suppliers across Africa, new and more efficient ways to access financial services. The startup offers companies capital loans – through Pivo Capital – of up to $50,000 to help grow their businesses. They also provide trade financial support, to help suppliers fill customer orders for up to 40-60 days. Capital loans have a tenure of 31 days.
Amadi-Emina holds a BSc in Computer Science and a Masters Degree in Business Analytics. She previously founded the now acquired Jalo, an on-demand delivery company. She is a serial entrepreneur with 8 years of experience in Startup growth and 2 years of experience in Finance. Over the years, she’s held remarkable leadership positions in private and public sector institutions.
While Akwiwu is a qualified lawyer and chartered arbitrator with an MSc in Software Development. Over the past 10 years, she’s worked in various industries, gathering profound experience and insight around corporate regulations, compliance, and best legal-business practices relevant to Pivo.
Pivo’s goal is to build an end-to-end financial operating system for SMEs. As the start-up progresses, Pivo would roll out a system that will run the entire financial life cycle of their customers’ transactions. Pivo will run its beta Finance product that would enable users to open and operate a corporate bank account suited for their business.
When users access the Pivo Dashboard, they provide their business information and get set up within 5 mins. After required documentation has been provided and verified, customers are able to apply and receive feedback on loans within 24 hours.
Prior to investment from Microtraction, Pivo had onboarded 100 active customers and processed more than $100k in loan applications. Since then, Pivo has seen twice the increase in numbers with 70% of loans disbursed to logistics sub-contractors.