The startup said it raised a $1.3 million pre-seed investment in February, bringing the total funds raised to $5.6 million.
Duplo, a Nigerian B2B payment startup, announced Wednesday it has raised a $4.3 million seed round.
The round included participation from Liquid2 Ventures, Soma Capital, Tribe Capital, Commerce Ventures, Basecamp Fund, and Y Combinator, existing investor Oui Capital also participated.
With the new funding, the startup said it plans to launch new products and expand into new business areas in Nigeria.
Launched in September 2021 by Yele Oyekola and Tunde Akinnuwa, Duplo's end-to-end solution automates the back-office processes of generating and processing invoices, receiving and approving bills, collecting and disbursing funds, and completing account reconciliation for finance teams.
The startup said it works seamlessly with all major accounting, and ERP platforms such as Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, QuickBooks, and Sage, and payments processed through Duplo are automatically synced with these platforms in real-time.
It said with Duplo, businesses can cut time spent on admin tasks such as account reconciliation by up to 50 per cent and reduce payment-related costs by up to 85 per cent.
According to the startup, it raised a $1.3 million pre-seed investment in February, bringing its total funds raised to $5.6 million.
Speaking on the funding round in a statement, the CEO and co-founder Yele Oyekola, said: "We have seen a lot of innovation in consumer payments in Africa in recent years but business-to-business payments have largely stayed the same.
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"We strongly believe that there is a great opportunity to catalyse growth and maximise business opportunities across the continent by removing the bottlenecks that hinder the seamless flow of money between businesses and we are excited to have raised funding from this exciting group of investors to deliver this much-needed transformation.
"We're also trying to expand into new verticals. Initially, we started with the FMCG industry; now we've seen interest in the construction industry, telecoms, and these major mid-sized enterprise businesses, and set up the foundation to scale across the continent hopefully in the next nine to 12 months," he said.
Peter Oriaifo, Principal at Oui Capital, said "The Duplo team has built an incredible suite of products that improve how businesses make and receive payments from each other, and the growth that the company has experienced since our initial pre-seed investment in 2021 has been nothing short of impressive. It is for this reason that we are excited to back Duplo once more."
