Monnai, a global infrastructure provider for consumer insights, announced its $3.15 million seed round led by Better Tomorrow Ventures “with participation from Commerce Ventures, Kearny Jackson and 9Yards Capital.”
This new investment round “marks the company’s 1-year anniversary and follows an initial pre-seed raised at the end of 2021 from 500 Global, Emphasis Ventures (EMVC) and Ginkgo Ventures who also participated in this round – bringing the total raised to-date amount to more than $4 million.”
Monnai is “built for fintechs by experienced fintech professionals, providing a global infrastructure that delivers customer insights to financial organizations to make more accurate and informed decisions throughout the lifecycle of their customers.”
Founded in 2021 by Pierre Demarche and Ravish Patel, Monnai has “emerged as the solution of choice for fintech firms looking to access a global integrated platform that helps them navigate the four key pillars of onboarding, trust and fraud risk, credit underwriting and debt collections.”
Monnai’s platform “includes four modules available through a single API: KYC, trust and fraud risk, credit decisioning and collections optimization.” It leverages 350+ insights aggregated and standardized “across trusted ecosystems of Identity, Digital, Communication, Device and Payments data partners.”
With the emergence of many forms of innovative solutions “across the entire fintech ecosystem, companies in this space are looking to innovate.” The team at Monnai “understands that the biggest need to achieve full market potential is access to critical infrastructure including effective credit bureaus, alternate data and standardized personal identification data.”
Pierre Demarche, Monnai CEO and cofounder, said:
“In a digital first world, every business is a fintech. While these innovations have global scale and applicability, the infrastructure supporting them is fragmented and siloed. There are a number of companies like credit bureaus or identity verification vendors in the US, however there is a lack of infrastructure available to businesses internationally, whether they are global or regional. The tools and data are often siloed into disparate solutions and across different markets. To grow, businesses need to leverage and consolidate better technology and data in the same platform, providing a ubiquitous approach to decisioning models.”
He added:
“By using the right data from across the customer lifecycle through multiple sources, fintechs and merchants can create net new business in a way that is also beneficial for the consumers.”
From neo banks, digital payments and remittance to embedded finance and crypto based payments, there is “an explosion of services targeting the digital customer across the globe with Asia, Latam and Eastern Europe rapidly emerging as the new innovation hubs.”
According to a report from Bain, in developing markets like in Southeast Asia, digital financial services could “represent up to a $60 billion opportunity by 2025, while India would represent a $150 billion market today.”
As these fintechs look to innovate, the biggest need “to achieve full market potential is access to critical infrastructure including effective credit bureaus, alternate data and standardized personal identification data.”
At the core of Monnai is the company’s commitment “to building a default global infrastructure, providing businesses with an infrastructure that was created with global innovation and diversity in mind.”
The funding will be “used for further development of the platform, new hires and continued global expansion.”
Monnai currently “has customers in India, Southeast Asia and LATAM, with plans to expand into North America later this year.”