Kenyan FinTech startup Asilimia walked away with a Ksh. 35 Million investment offer from the Unicorn Group and three weeks of acceleration in Silicon Valley, Lagos or Budapest. This is after the startup scooped the Africa Cup at the SA Innovation Summit.
Founded by Tekwane Mwendwa in 2017, Asilimia aims to empower small businesses through an affordable, easy-to-use and tailored digital payments platform. Its Android app gives business owners direct access to a payment infrastructure specifically tailored to their needs via their mobile phone, eliminating tedious registration processes and allowing them to easily send money at scale, invest savings on transaction fees into insurance or business loans, gain insights into their finances, and minimise payment fraud.
The startup was launched after the founder, Mwendwa found himself unable to afford a bus ride home due to high mobile money withdrawal fees, even though he had sufficient funds in his mobile wallet. He decided to create an affordable and simple digital payment solution, which has since been targeted at micro and small businesses, which create 80 per cent of Kenya’s jobs and contribute 40 per cent of the country’s GDP.
The company’s Co-Founder and CEO, Tekwane Mwendwa, had this to say, “This will aid us in empowering informal and small businesses in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa, as well as other countries, with the ability to build wealth or protect the minimal resources that they have by creating better financial instruments for them.”