February 12, 2021 - BY Admin
Prakhar Singh and ex-Paystack employee Abdul Hassan have known each other for seven years, building different tech products individually and collectively along the way.
Before joining Paystack in 2018, Hassan co-founded payments startup OyaPay the year before. After leaving the Stripe-owned company in 2019, he launched a data startup called Voyance where Singh, who had already exited one of his products — Transferpay.ng, an offline payments startup — was a software engineer.
Last June, the duo started working on Mono, a project that would allow companies to access their customers’ financial accounts in Nigeria.
By streamlining various data in a single API, companies and third-party developers can retrieve vital information like account statements, real-time balance, historical transactions, income, expense and account owner identification. Of course, this isn’t without users’ consent as they are required to log in with their internet or mobile login credentials before any transaction takes place.
Following a series of tests and iterations, Mono launched its beta version in August, with Hassan as CEO and Singh as CTO. A month later, the startup closed a $500,000 pre-seed investment from early-stage investors likeLateral Capital, Ventures Platform, Golden Palm Investments and Rally Cap. It was one of the notable pre-seed rounds on the continent because of the length of time it took from launch to funding, a trait other API fintech startups in the region share, albeit with significantly longer timelines.
