Termii, a Nigeria-based communications platform-as-a-service startup, has raised $3.65 million in new financing round, totalling its funding till date to about $5 million.
Termii was founded in 2017 by Gbolade Emmanuel, Ayomide Awe and Atinuke Idowu. The innovative startup was founded after the founders saw the need for African businesses to have unrivaled communication channels. The startup then built an API-based communication infrastructure to empower businesses, especially fintechs, to engage customers through SMS, voice messaging, mobile tokens, alerts, and a two-way support system.
“So far, we have been successful in serving customers with pure messaging solutions; however, we realized that the demand for customers grew beyond messaging. Most of our financial services customers required one-time verification systems to valid user transactions and identity; hence we introduced this across SMS, calls, emails, and WhatsApp, giving them multiple options and better delivery rates,” CEO, Gbolade Emmanuel, said.
The startup added that it is working on expanding its services by adding infrastructure that support calls and OTP (one-time password) generation to increase transaction numbers. Termii claims that its newly launched mobile app – TermiiGo – will be the main engine behind that growth. The startup tagged TermiiGo as “Africa’s first cross-company mobile virtual solution.”
The CEO also noted that the startup’s other product, the eSim system, can give African companies the power to offer their employees and users eSIM with unlimited voice calls and texts. Emmanuel claims that the eSim feature will ease remote working and help companies support their workers with data to work without them having to switch sims when they travel out of local coverage area. Emmanuel said this feature will roll out to Nigerian market first, before expanding to other parts of the world.
“We plan to support more countries in the future, like countries in the U.K. We plan to launch all these services in phases and have seen growing interest in this product from big tech and financial service providers and small enterprise businesses. We would be launching physically first in Nigeria at our conference this June and also in Ivory Coast, Ghana, and the U.S. After which we would explore other locations. However, other features on our app would be open for use across multiple African countries,” Termii CEO said.
Termii’s financing round was led by the Pan-African early-stage investment firm, Venture Platform, with further participations from the New York-based fund – FinTech Collective, and Launch Africa Ventures.
Other firms that participated in the round include Nama Ventures, Aidi Ventures, Ralicap Ventures, Now Venture Partners, Vastly Valuable Ventures, NOA Capital, Assembly Investors, Probability Ventures, Adamantium Fund, MyAsia VC and Uncovered Fund. Angel investors that participated in the round include Afropreneur Angel Group, Aubrey Hruby, partner at Tofino Capital and Eamon Jubbawy of Onifido.
Speaking on the partnership, Samantha Wulfson of FinTech Collective said:
“Termii’s solution was cited as the fundamental piece of their infrastructure powering day-to-day business operations, ensuring the delivery of OTPs and transaction-related messages with a higher degree of certainty than ever before, and is still only scratching the surface of their vision as a communication layer.”
General partner at Ventures Platform, Dotun Olowoporoku, also relayed the reasons behind his firm backed Termii. He said:
“Termii stood out to us as a game-changer in the A2P (Application-to-Person) messaging space. Their platform fills a crucial gap by providing seamless integration of telecom services, solving the high message failure rates and complex setup requirements experienced by businesses across the continent.”