Six hundred thousand dollars is now behind CreditChek's push into East Africa, and the Lagos-based startup is moving fast. The Nigerian credit data infrastructure company closed the pre-seed round led by Janngo Capital, with Assembly Investors, Vastly Valuable Ventures, and Unipeg Capital also participating. Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda are the first targets outside Nigeria.
Founded in 2022 by Kingsley Ibe and Lionel Orishane, CreditChek gives banks, fintechs, and microfinance institutions smarter tools to decide who gets a loan and at what risk. Its two flagship products are Credit Insight, which pulls cross-border credit history data, and Income Insight, an AI-powered tool that reads bank statements to verify income and map a borrower's cash flow. The company says loans underwritten using its infrastructure have recorded delinquency rates more than 75% lower than those using traditional methods.
The timing makes sense. African MSMEs are staring down a financing gap estimated at over $330 billion, and lenders across the continent are still working with thin credit files and fragmented financial data. CreditChek is betting that better data infrastructure is the missing link between cautious lenders and creditworthy borrowers who simply lack the paper trail to prove it.
Fatoumata Bâ, Founder and Executive Chair of Janngo Capital, framed the investment as a direct response to that gap, saying the company is "building the credit data infrastructure Africa needs to scale responsible lending." For CreditChek, East Africa is just the first stop on a much longer journey.
Originally published by TechCabal.