Anchor, a Nigerian banking-as-a-service (BaaS) provider, has raised $2.4 million in seed investment. Justin Kan’s Goat Capital led the financing round which also welcomed participation from FoundersX, Rebel Fund and some existing investors, including Y Combinator and Byld Ventures. 

The fintech emerged from stealth a year ago with over $1 million in pre-seed funding. Its proposition was straightforward: provide APIs, dashboards, and tools to assist developers in embedding and building banking solutions. Anchor is one of a few BaaS providers in the Nigerian market; it competes in a crowded fintech space that includes JUMO, Maplerad, OnePipe and Bloc.

Incumbent banks have been lazy in bringing their services up to speed in a rapidly changing digital banking world. Consequently, these platforms have been popular with neobanks and other businesses that seek to embed financial services within their products. Now, platforms offering banking-as-a-service perceive an opportunity to deliver more personalized services and flexibility at a lower cost. They assist these firms in providing bank accounts, payments, savings, and cards.Anchor partners with regulated banking institutions. By doing this, it claims to help businesses shorten the process of building banking products from years to days. The fintech catered to only customer accounts when it first launched. However, according to Anchor co-founder and CEO Segun Adeyemi, Anchor’s APIs now support business accounts, card issuance, bill payments, bulk disbursements, cross-border payments, and developer-only features such as an audit log system and developer webhooks.

“If you look at the scope of product today, even though there were a few other players that have been in the market before us, there is no one that has the scope of offering that we have in the market today,” the CEO who founded Anchor with Olamide Sobowale and Gbekeloluwa Olufotebi told TechCrunch on a call. “This can be validated by looking at the scope of our offerings and comparing them to what similar companies do today.”