Carbon Acquires Nigerian Fintech Startup Vella Finance

Carbon, a digital financial services provider has acquired Vella Finance; Nigerian Fintech Startup that focuses on SMEs.

On Wednesday, an official statement announced the transaction. The specifics of the transaction’s monetary value, however, were not disclosed.

One Credit Limited, Carbon’s parent business, bought out Vella Finance, which had been around for two years.

In order to help its customers gain useful information from their financial transactions, the digital bank plans to use Vella Finance’s SME banking tool, which is driven by artificial intelligence.

After Carbon acquired Vella Finance, Tolu Adedayo, COO and co-founder of the company, disclosed that other startup co-founders and employees had joined the company.

Adebayo announced that in the next days, Vella Finance’s 8,000 small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) customers would be transferred to Carbon Business as part of this integration.

As an additional feature, he said that regular users would have the option to switch to business accounts.

“Carbon pioneered the consumer finance revolution in Nigeria in 2016,” stated Chijioke Dozie, Carbon’s co-founder. We set out to provide customers with mobile banking capabilities that had never been seen before. In the time after, we did lend money to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), but not always in a way that satisfied our clients or ourselves.

We have known the Vella Finance group for a while and have always respected their creativity and awareness of customer wants and needs. The same adventurous and creative attitude that sparked Carbon was evident in them. It was an easy decision to go with their SME platform because we think it’s the best on the market and it aligns well with our goals.

The announcement of their partnership with Carbon is great news for companies, and Vella Finance’s co-founder and CEO, Mark Afolabi, expressed his excitement about the partnership. Companies in Nigeria and by working together are navigating these challenging times.

“Our platform offers businesses AI-driven insights into their transactions, accessible loans at low costs, and the power of AI models to tackle any business challenge.”

The commitment to consumers will remain unchanged, according to Vella Finance, notwithstanding the change in ownership.

According to the firm, the acquisition will open up new consumer bases, fund the creation of innovative financial solutions, and make banking safer for everyone.

The sons of Paschal Dozie, who was previously the chairman of Diamond Bank and MTN Nigeria, are Chijioke and Ngozi Dozie, the co-founders of Carbon.

Their older brother, Uzoma Dozie, abandoned his position as CEO of Diamond Bank to found Sparkle, a digital microfinance institution.

All three of them came from families where banking was a mainstay of the economy.