Lagos-based Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) platform, Klump has secured the sum of $780,000 to invest in its flagship ‘Pay with KlumpTM’ product with its partners.
The startup in line with its funds raised is launching its end-to-end BNPL product in partnership with WhoGoHost and Gigalayer, notable providers of domain, hosting and cloud services in Nigeria.
The round was led by Seedcamp, a London-based investment firm and also saw participation from MAGIC Fund, Voltron Capital, Yellowwood, Kickoff Africa, Hoaq Capital, Kesho VC, Assembly Investors.
Other angel investors and founders that contributed to the round include; Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, CEO of Flutterwave, Will Neale, Founder of Grabyo, Michael Pennington, Founder of Gumtree, Founders of Helium Health, Richmond Bassey, CEO of Bamboo, Babs Ogundeyi, CEO of Kuda Bank, Abdul Hassan, CEO of Mono, Opeyemi Awoyemi, and Selma Ribica also participated in the round.
In addition to this, the startup has partnered with AltSchool; an alternative tech academic institution and Betastore; a B2B retail platform to provide laptop financing to its students and provide inventory financing to its retail customers.
The platform which offers an installment paying system has said that it is rolling out other large-scale partnerships with a focus on marketplaces with higher-margin, discretionary-spend categories, such as apparel and footwear, fitness, accessories, and beauty.
Celestine Omin, CEO of Klump, said its BNPL offering is a natural next step in the development of the African e-commerce sector and it intends to make credit decisions on customers in real-time and offer flexible payment to limit the economic pressure of one-time payment which has grown astronomically since the emergence of COVID-19.
He said, “At the same time, we want to help merchants achieve commercial prosperity by providing the tools to offer their customers the option to pay in small instalments.”
Olufunbi Falayi, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Klump, added “with our end-to-end BNPL product, we can quickly make a sound credit eligibility decision, facilitate transactions to approved customers, make disbursements to merchants, and effectively drive collections from customers with a flexible and efficient collections system”.
“We are keeping mechanisms in place to ensure we promote responsible lending and reduce the risk of customers taking loans they cannot pay back”.
Felix Martinez, an investor at Seedcamp, “we’re thrilled to be backing Celestine and Olufunbi as they lay the backbone in democratising new payment methods across a hugely under-served African market”.
“It was clear to us from our first meeting that their respective experiences scaling some of Africa’s largest startup successes and implementing best-in-class payment solutions for large e-commerce merchants makes them the perfect team to become the responsible BNPL category leader on the continent.”
