Cameroonian fintech startup, Diool closed $3.5m in funding. The funding was led by Lundin Group and other existing investors. This makes Diool the fourth francophone African startup to have raised over $1m in less than 6 months.
Serge and Phillip Boupda, two brothers, founded Diool in the year 2015. The company started as an app that sold prepaid recharges to customers. Diool gradually advanced in directional change, and by 2018, it completed its evolution by developing to become a financial services aggregator that provides several payment methods for small merchants to accept payments or repay suppliers.
The financial services company, according to reports, has signed up more than 2,000 merchants and has processed over $120m. The company’s transactions are aided by strategic integrations with all the mobile money providers in the country, as well as a partnership with Societe Generale, a French multinational investment bank.
According to the company’s CEO, Serge Boupda, the purpose for the just concluded funding round is to to create and facilitate an easier medium for small merchants in Africa to access financial services. Serge Boupda, CEO of Diool told Disrupt Africa; ‘We’re doing Cameroon and payments first. We’ve also spent some time rebuilding operational architecture and processes, to match new payments regulations in Cameroon – a critical building block for financial services distribution in the region’.
In the meantime, the company’s focus will be on spreading its wings all over Cameroon and growing its teams. A future expansion, following another funding round, which might move the company’s operations outside Cameroon, is envisaged. To this effect, Serge Boupda, Diool CEO stated; ‘Our next stage is growing the team and product to scale in Cameroon ahead of entering other countries’.
Diool startup, according to Crunchbase, raised $600k in funding round in 2015, $250k in funding round in 2018, and $1.2m in 2020. Adding these figures to the latest funding of $3.5m, this brings the company’s total disclosed rounds to $5.6m.
Diool is one of those fintech companies in Africa with potentials to push Africa to the forefront in terms of telecom and payment operations, as well as technical integrations. For a company that has come from grass to grace, it is really doing well and representing the continent in a good light.
