Grace Ashiru
Kenyan fintech CreditChek has closed a $600,000 funding round to extend its credit data infrastructure into East Africa, adding to an already profitable track record in Nigeria.
The round was led by Janngo Capital, with participation from returning backer Assembly Investors and new investors Vastly Valuable Ventures and Unipeg Capital.
CreditChek aggregates credit data from financial institutions, bureaus, and alternative data sources, normalising everything into a single API that lets lenders evaluate borrower risk in real time. The problem it is solving is acute: despite the rapid expansion of mobile money and digital finance across East Africa, lenders have long struggled with fragmented and unreliable credit data, making underwriting expensive and risk assessment imprecise.
The company enters this expansion from a strong commercial base. It has processed more than $60 million in credit applications across one million unique profiles in Nigeria and achieved profitability there. It previously completed the MTN Cloud Accelerator programme and secured a partnership with Bboxx under a $750 million World Bank-backed initiative aimed at extending solar financing to rural Nigerian households.
Janngo Capital founder Fatoumata Bâ said the firm backed CreditChek because it addresses Africa’s estimated $331 billion MSME financing gap directly, by enabling lenders to make sharper decisions using richer data.
CEO Kingsley Ibe said the fresh capital will be used to deepen the company’s integrations with banks, microfinance institutions, and fintech lenders across East Africa, with the goal of becoming the continent’s leading cross-border credit infrastructure provider
