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Congratulations to portfolio company Mines and CEO Ekechi Nwokah on raising a $13m Series A led by TPG's Rise Fund, with participation from Velocity Capital and other investors. Mines will bring consumer lending to emerging markets, finding customers where they already are - their mobile phones.
The startup’s leadership team is led by three Nigerians — Nwokah, Chief Scientist Kunle Olukotun and MD Adia Sowho. The company came together after Olukotun (then and still a Stanford professor) and Nwokah (a then-AWS big data specialist) met in Palo Alto in 2014. Looking through the lens of their home country Nigeria, the two identified two problems in emerging markets: low access to credit across large swaths of the population and insufficient tools for big institutions to put together viable consumer lending programs.
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