Lagos-based payment service provider Nomba raised a $30M pre-Series B led by Base 10 Partners at a $150M+ valuation, per YC, after a $5M Series A in April 2019
Tage Kene-Okafor / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Nomba's raise closes a long gap in its own funding history: after its Series A peer Kuda-era cohort moved fast in 2021, Nomba waited four years between a $5M Series A and this $30M pre-Series B led by Base 10 Partners at a $150M+ valuation. It lands into a Lagos market where the benchmark has been reset twice by Moniepoint — first with a $110M round at a $1B+ valuation, then again months later — making Nomba's step-up look more like catching up than leading.
First-order effects
- Nomba gains fresh capital and a new lead investor in Base 10 Partners, but enters the pre-Series B stage at a valuation an order of magnitude below Moniepoint's, which now claims it processes $250B+ in yearly transactions.
Second-order effects
- Competing for Nigerian merchants against a scaled Moniepoint means Nomba must deploy this $30M on distribution rather than product parity; the same pressure shaped peers like South Africa's Yoco, whose $83M Series C showed how capital-intensive SME payment rails are continent-wide.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across Kuda, Sabi, and Moniepoint points to African payments consolidating around a small set of heavily capitalized platforms, with mid-tier players like Nomba either scaling quickly toward that tier or becoming consolidation targets.
The trend: African payments is stratifying into unicorn-scale processors and a chase tier, where each successive mega-round by Moniepoint raises the capital bar for Lagos rivals.