Bloom, a Sudanese fintech company that provides a high-yield savings account and related digital banking services, has raised a $6.5 million seed round. This investment follows the startup’s secret pre-seed round from the previous year.
The fintech behemoth Visa, Y Combinator, the American VC firms Global Founders Capital (GFC) and Goodwater Capital, as well as the UAE-based early-stage company VentureSouq, all participated in this financing.
Other investors include football players, Blaise Matuidi and Kieran Gibbs, co-founder of Dropbox Arash Ferdowsi, Nicolas Kopp, former U.S. CEO of N26, and early staff members of Revolut and Tide.
One of the rewards for Bloom’s participation in Visa’s Fintech Fast Track Program was the investment from the international payment network.
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The first Sudanese business to be accepted into the program, Bloom, went from using Mastercard to using Visa as a result of the formation of a partnership.
Due to a few factors, businesses like ours find the Visa investment to be essential. Visa Fintech Fast Track also enables users to access these incentives in a straightforward manner, according to CEO Ahmed Ismail, there are lots of benefits to partnering with Visa, including the ability to launch products more quickly and receive marketing and product support.
Following its secret launch in January, the company revealed in March that it was a part of Y Combinator’s winter batch for this year.
Additionally, when Bloom’s waitlist was made public in March, it had more than 15,000 members; as of now, it has more than 100,000, according to the company’s founders in a statement. Despite claiming that the site has been launched in Sudan, they opted not to disclose the precise number of users.
The founders of Bloom have stated that this seed round will assist the Sudanese and Dubai-based startup carry out its expansion plan throughout the Anglo-East African region, including Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya, and Zambia, Tanzania, as was noted in March and reaffirmed in the interview. Finclusion, Koa, and the YC-backed Fingo are a few rivals in the area.
“We sell live goods in Sudan. Scaling up within the nation is the goal, followed by market expansion,” according to Ismail. “We want to enter at least one market before the year is out, and a few more early the next year.” The highest seed round has ever been raised in Sudan, a nation with a passive digital industry that recently opened its doors to foreign investment when Fawry backed fintech and e-commerce firm Alsoug following 30 years of international sanctions.
