Nomba pivots from chatbot to agency banking; 300k businesses, $1B monthly, $30M round

Nomba, founded in 2016 by Adeyinka Adewale and Pelumi Aboluwarin, began life as Kudi, a YC-backed chatbot that handled financial requests inside social apps. It failed to scale because Nigeria's economy still runs on cash — 90% of informal-economy transactions are cash-based and over 60 million adults are unbanked — so two years after launch the founders pivoted.

The pivot was to agency banking: Nomba put POS terminals in the hands of thousands of small business owners who offered cash withdrawal, transfers and bill payments to the unbanked. A $5M Series A from Partech and Khosla Ventures followed in 2019, an acquisition of agent network CrowdForce deepened its reach, and in May 2022 Kudi rebranded as Nomba to reflect its move from a single POS product to an omnichannel payments platform.

In May 2023 Nomba raised a $30M pre-Series B led by San Francisco's Base10 Partners, with Partech, Khosla Ventures, Helios Digital Ventures and Shopify participating, valuing the company above $150M per YC data. At the time it reported more than 300,000 businesses using at least one product, $1B in monthly transactions, and revenue growing 150% year over year since 2020.

The company kept evolving: in FY2025, its first full year as an API-led payments business, it processed N122B (~$77M) across 1.85M transactions, with virtual accounts accounting for 75% of API volume, a 99.78% transaction success rate, and an Apple Pay integration announced late in the year.