Kuunda, a Mauritius headquartered fintech, is sharpening its position as a key liquidity infrastructure provider for emerging markets. The company recently closed a 7.5 million dollar pre Series A round to accelerate its expansion across Africa and the Middle East, starting with Egypt. In parallel, Kuunda announced that its platform has processed more than 560 million loans, a scale that underlines the resilience and reliability of its infrastructure for partners and end users.
Mission rooted in creating a new financial dynamic
Founded in 2018 and legally headquartered in Forbach, Mauritius, Kuunda operates with a clear mission to reshape how capital flows in emerging economies. Its name comes from the Swahili word for “to create,” reflecting its goal of enabling every financially active participant to play a productive role in building their economy. This philosophy guides its focus on agents, merchants, micro and small businesses, and consumers who often face structural liquidity gaps.
Embedded finance and Lending as a Service
Kuunda positions itself as a B2B embedded finance and digital lending infrastructure provider. The company offers a Lending as a Service platform that delivers overdraft and working capital products directly within the systems of banks, mobile money operators, and digital platforms. These products include airtime float loans, merchant cash advances, stock financing, fuel financing, and mobile money liquidity that are tailored to high frequency, real economy transactions.
Liquidity rails, credit scoring, and flagship products
At the core of Kuunda’s proposition is a liquidity API that allows partners to embed credit products seamlessly into their own customer interfaces. This API is powered by proprietary credit scoring models that use behavioral and transactional data to assess risk in real time. On top of this infrastructure, Kuunda runs branded solutions such as Kazi Cash and Hapa Cash, which provide instant liquidity and growth financing for agents and micro merchants.
Market footprint across Africa and Pakistan
Although legally based in Mauritius, Kuunda’s operational footprint spans multiple African markets and Pakistan. The company works closely with mobile money agents, merchants, and MSMEs in countries where access to formal credit remains limited but digital transactions are rapidly growing. By targeting these intermediaries in the payment and distribution chains, Kuunda aims to keep liquidity flowing where it has the highest multiplier effect on local economies.
Funding profile and key backers
To date, Kuunda has raised an estimated 9.75 million dollars across two rounds, combining a prior seed raise with the recent 7.5 million dollar pre Series A. The latest round is intended to fuel market expansion, deepen product offerings, and support entry into North African and Middle Eastern markets, with Egypt as the initial beachhead. Its cap table includes investors such as Accion Venture Lab, Seedstars, 4Di Capital, Nedbank, E4E Africa, FINCA Ventures, and Launch Africa, among others, signaling strong institutional confidence in its model.
Founding team and leadership depth
Kuunda is led by co founder and co-CEO Andrew Milne, who brings a background in fintech and mobile health entrepreneurship and has focused his career on liquidity and productivity challenges in African markets. Co-founder and Co-CEO Morné van der Westhuizen brings deep expertise in data science and analytics, with previous leadership roles at Zoona and experience as a senior data science consultant to the IFC on financial inclusion projects. Co-founder and CPO Samuel Brawerman contributes extensive experience in mobile financial services and microfinance, drawing on prior roles at Zoona and Millicom to design products tailored to the needs of agents, microbusinesses, and underserved consumers.
Impact on financial inclusion and system resilience
The processing of more than 560 million loans through Kuunda’s platform is not just a headline number, it reflects repeated usage by agents and merchants who rely on liquidity to keep their businesses running. Each loan is structured around real transaction behavior, which helps reduce over indebtedness risks while ensuring that capital is deployed for productive purposes. By embedding these products in existing digital ecosystems, Kuunda strengthens the resilience of local financial systems and helps partners build more inclusive portfolios.
Kuunda’s combination of embedded infrastructure, data driven underwriting, and focused leadership places it firmly at the center of the liquidity challenge in emerging markets. With fresh capital from a 7.5 million dollar pre Series A round and a track record of processing hundreds of millions of loans, the company is positioned to scale its impact across Africa and the Middle East. As it deepens partnerships with banks, mobile money operators, and digital platforms, Kuunda aims to make real time, responsible working capital a standard feature of everyday financial services rather than an exception.