San Francisco based financial inclusion startup Juvo has raised $40m in Series B funding led by Wing Venture Capital and New Enterprise Associates. Juvo wants to help mobile users in emerging markets improve their financial standing by combining data and identity to provide micro-loans.
Juvo joins companies like Branch and Tala in bringing financial services to the underserved in developing markets. But how Juvo differentiates is by working with mobile operators as the entry point to its relationship with the consumer. It does this by offering micro-loans to pre-paid mobile customers when they are short on data or minutes. In many developing markets, mobile users operate on pre-paid plans which they top off every couple of days, often by purchasing more talk time or data at a nearby store. That means the mobile operators don’t have any relationship with the end user, but it also means consumers can run out of data at inopportune times.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/01/juvo-40-million-nea-wing-venture-capital/