Pngme, a San Francisco-based financial data platform, announced yesterday that it has secured $15 million in Series A funding to grow the company’s financial data infrastructure and Machine Learning -as-a-service platform.
According to the latest announcement, the investment round was led by Octopus Ventures, a London-based venture capital firm. In addition to the recent financing, Pngme announced the expansion of its executive team with the hiring of Lorraine Kageni Maina as Chief Strategy Officer and Nick Masson as Chief Technology Officer.
Pngme mentioned that the company is planning to expand its engineering, product, sales and data science teams to meet the growing international demand.
Commenting on the Series A Funding Round , Brendan Playford, CEO of Pngme, said: “With the demand we are seeing in our core markets and from financial institutions globally, it is clear we are solving a major pain point by building financial data infrastructure and machine learning-as-a-service. With this fresh injection of capital, we are not only scaling up our data processing and machine learning capabilities but also building a robust team that can deliver on our mission of financial inclusion.”
In addition to Octopus Ventures, several other investors including Lateral Capital, Unshackled Ventures, Raptor Group, EchoVC, Future Africa and Aruwa Capital Management participated in the investment round.
Expansion in Africa
In the announcement, Pngme highlighted the growing market of Africa and mentioned that the company is planning to deliver innovative services to different financial companies including fintech firms across sub-Saharan Africa.
“Pngme’s infrastructure has processed billions of data points from hundreds of financial institutions across sub-Saharan Africa, and we plan to double down on our Insights Library and expand our third-party data connections to other markets over the next year," Cate Rung, COO of Pngme, commented.
A group of individual angel investors including RallyCap’s Hayden Simmons, Plaid’s Dan Khan, former COO of RBC Capital Markets Richard Talbot, Creative Destruction Lab mentors, and Intersect VC’s Kyle Ellicott joined the $15 million investment round.
