Monnai lands $6.5M Series A funding to connect disparate data sources through a single API, so fintechs can focus on growth

The expansion of fintech companies into emerging markets presents a tremendous opportunity that could bring in tens of millions (if not hundreds) of new customers. However, both fintech companies and financial institutions are becoming more aware of the significant costs and damage to their reputation that can result from lax onboarding and identity standards.

Unfortunately, identity standards and customer data in these markets are fragmented, disparate, and constantly changing. This disorganized fragmentation is scattered among telecom providers, emerging credit bureaus, third-party data providers, and financial institutions. That’s why one fintech startup is on a mission to leverage AI to provide the infrastructure that connects disparate data sources through a single API, allowing fintech companies to concentrate on expanding their business.

Enter Monnai, a San Francisco-based startup and a provider of the world’s first global consumer insights infrastructure that empowers financial institutions to effectively navigate four essential pillars: onboarding, risk management and fraud prevention, credit evaluation, and collections.

To further support its mission of becoming the single source of truth for fintech decision-making globally, Monnai announced today it has closed $6.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Tiger Global, with participation from Better Tomorrow Ventures, which led the company’s seed round six months earlier. Addition backers include existing investors: 500 Global and Emphasis Ventures (EMVC). The latest round brings the company’s total funding raised to more than $10 million.

Founded in 2019 by CEO Pierre Demarche and Ravish Patel, Monnai empowers its clients to more efficiently and accurately leverage data to make decisions throughout the lifecycle of their customers, from onboarding to credit underwriting to all aspects of account transactions.

The two co-founders have been working together for more than 10 years and met in Belgium as we were working for the same global communication company.

“In a digital-first world, every business is a fintech. Whether you’re in an established market or an emerging market, there’s an inherent need for clean infrastructure. Businesses globally have been developing strong capabilities using more and more data to make their own decisions. The challenge is to get access to the insights that will inform decisions across silos and use cases in as many useful ways as possible. This is where Monnai comes into play, providing a single source of truth for businesses across entire customer and transactions lifecycles,” said Monnai CEO and co-founder Pierre Demarche.

Monnai’s platform seamlessly integrates the increasing number of disparate data sources across the globe and provides its customers with tools to navigate the increasing fraud and evolving regulatory landscapes. This adaptive infrastructure delivers four key decisioning modules — Know Your Customer, Trust & Fraud Risk, Credit Decisioning, and Collections Optimization — through a single API.

The resulting infrastructure leverages more than 350 contextual insights including payment, communication, device, identity, etc. The company developed unique technologies that enable a low code/no code dynamic aggregation, normalization, and contextualization of data sets, across silos and borders, leading to better analytics and faster ingestion, modeling, and implementation of alternative data for customers.

“Monnai stands out for its unique ability to simplify in one seamless platform the complex web of information sources businesses must navigate to best make decisions,” said Alex Cook, Partner, Tiger Global. “We are thrilled to support their mission of scaling this solution further, which we believe will be a key enabler to the growth of the fintech market as a whole.”

“We are excited to have a seasoned partner like Tiger Global who shares our vision and who will help accelerate our growth trajectory,” Demarche said.