Founded earlier this year, FinTech start-up Sava from Cape Town, South Africa has announced a $2M pre-seed round to develop its central spend-management platform. The FinTech start-up is set to launch in South Africa with a platform that enables smart data sourcing, multi-level credit scorecards and predictive analytics – all of which reduce lending risk for African businesses in the formal economy.
The financial industry is undergoing a radical transformation. A recent McKinsey study found that Africa’s banking market is the second fastest growing and second most profitable market globally. Africa’s FinTech sector attracted half of all African venture capital in 2021, and is likely to continue attracting investors tapping into high growth opportunities.
Amidst all of this innovation, many African businesses struggle to manage their finances, with specific pain points being spend management and monthly reconciliations. The two arenas of particular inefficiency are businesses not having the tools to enable them to control spending; and business owners and their teams spending countless hours compiling receipts, sharing with finance departments, exporting data from bank statements, compiling expense reports, and sending reports to their accountants. Manual reconciliations take days, and multiple iterations to get right. And with all this manual record-keeping, financial institutions lack sufficient data to lend prudently.
Experiencing these frustrations and seeing they were shared by peers led the founding team to launch Sava. The spend-management platform combines bank accounts, mobile wallets, payments, accounting integrations, and invoice and expense management tools in one platform.
Sava provides customers with cards and wallets that are tied to its software to automate tedious finance processes. The company will offer digital business bank accounts that allow businesses to manage their invoices. The platform will enable businesses to:
Loading...
● Control spending using spend management tools,
● Seamlessly reconcile accounting records,
● Provide credit cards to employees, digitising expense reimbursements,
● Integrate budgets and actual cash flows.
Experience with credit bureaus, banks, business owners and FinTechs has given the team insights into how traditional financial institutions evaluate consumer and business credit viability.
The Sava founding team consists of CEO Yoeal Haile, who brings extensive FinTech experience and founded the largest BNPL platform in East Africa; COO Federico von Bary Landesmann, who has founded 3 African businesses with over $1M annual revenue: and CTO Kola Olajide, a tech entrepreneur and a Forbes 30 Under 30 Award for Technology honouree who has led digital transformation and product development for several successful South African businesses.
Sava has secured A-list investors, several of which are among the most prominent FinTech investors globally. They include Quona Capital, Breega, CRE Ventures, Ingressive Capital, RaliCap, Unicorn Growth Capital and Sherpa Ventures. These funders have backed many of the most successful start-ups on the continent, including Flutterwave, Paystack, Yoco, Wasoko and Andela.
The team has partnered with prominent global and pan-African institutions to build efficiency into the platform. With this funding, the trio are excited to bring their vision to life and allow African business owners to take control of their finances and attract the capital to scale their businesses and transform the continent.
The platform is set to launch in South Africa in Q3, with a focus on spend management and insights that will help them save time and money. Later this year, Sava aims to launch in Kenya.
Learn more about the Sava platform and how you can sign up https://sava.africa/
Sava
Sava is a spend-management platform combines bank accounts, mobile wallets, payments, accounting integrations, and invoice and expense management tools in one platform : https://sava.africa/
Loading...