African Digital Bank Umba Grabs $15M for Accessible Banking

African digital bank Umba on Wednesday (April 13) closed a $15 million Series A fundraising round that will help the platform continue its growth in existing African markets and allow it to expand into new ones, with an eye on meeting the needs of underserved customers.

Costanoa Ventures led Umba’s funding effort, with participation by Lux Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Banana Capital, Chandaria Capital and Streamlined Ventures. Previous investor also participated, including Lachy Groom and ACT Ventures, as well as angel investors including Monzo founder Tom Blomfield and executives from NuBank.

Umba has raised a total of $17.5 million to date, including their seed round in late 2020, and has doubled its revenue every three months while growing its team across four locations. The new funding will allow Umba to expand its operations and product offerings — including debit cards, savings accounts and stock trading — and prepare to launch in new markets.

“This is a great milestone for Umba, and we’re excited to bring in new partners to fuel our growth,” said Umba CEO Tiernan Kennedy in the company press release. “There is great potential for Umba to provide useful, accessible products and services that financially empower underserved customers.

“There’s a generational shift happening in banking, and customers stand to benefit massively from the move to fully digital services,” he said.

Umba recently added several key hires to its team from established FinTechs, including ex-CFO of Nigerian unicorn Interswitch, the former CTO and CAO from Calypso Technology and senior staff from Carbon and Zynga.

“This investment allows us to continue to hire the best people across banking and FinTech to build something new from the ground up, centered around our customers’ everyday needs,” said CFO and co-founder Barry O’Mahony in the company press release.

“Over the past year we’ve experienced rapid growth in our customer base and payment volume, which validates just how much customer demand is in the market for our product,” he said.

Related: African Payments Company Cellulant Expands Its Business Platform Into Ghana

Earlier this week, Cellulant debuted a new digital pay platform, Tingg, which will help businesses and customers to make seamless payments.