In May 2019, Serge Boupda stood before investors in a room at the Vivatech trade fair in Paris, pitching to raise $1.5m for his startup, Diool, which had then pivoted from a mobile recharge retailer to a fintech company after discovering that financial services access was the pain point of its target users in Cameroon.

Then, his startup had processed over one million euros’ worth of transactions in the central African country. But the investment did not come; even though the startup had just been the overall winner of the prestigious Seedstars Cameroon Competition a year ago.

A year before, a neighboring Nigerian fintech startup, Paystack, launched at the same time as Diool and which had long concluded its seed round, had announced an $8m Series A round. This was immediately followed by another investment of $10m in fellow country fintech startup Paga.

Now, two years have passed after the pitch at Vivatech, and Serge Boupda has taken some momentary rest to make a major interim announcement: that Diool has secured $3.5 million in funding, but not from the regular investors within the African fintech startup ecosystem.

“We do Cameroon and payments first. We also spent some time rebuilding the architecture and business processes, to match Cameroon’s new payment regulations — a critical part of delivering financial services in the region,” said Serge Boupda, Diool’s co-founder in a bare press release.

Read more...https://media.getfundedafrica.com/2021/02/26/cameroonian-fintech-startup-diool-secures-3-5mn-in-series-a-round-of-investment/