A Nigerian credit infrastructure company has raised $600,000 to extend its data aggregation platform into East Africa, targeting lenders who struggle to underwrite borrowers because reliable credit information remains scarce and disconnected across the region.
CreditChek, founded in Lagos in 2021 by Kingsley Ibe and Lionel Orishane, pulls credit data from financial institutions, credit bureaus, and alternative data providers and delivers it through a unified API that lenders can query in real time. The company says the round was led by pan-African investor Janngo Capital, with participation from returning backer Assembly Investors and two new entrants, Vastly Valuable Ventures and Unipeg Capital.
The raise is small by recent African fintech standards, but it follows a period of measurable commercial progress. CreditChek says it has processed more than $60 million in credit applications across one million individual profiles and reached profitability in Nigeria — a threshold many African fintech infrastructure companies have not yet crossed at this stage. The company completed the MTN Cloud Accelerator programme earlier this year and holds a partnership with Bboxx under the World Bank-funded DARES initiative, a $750 million programme aimed at extending solar financing to rural Nigerian households.
The data problem in African lending
The underlying challenge CreditChek is addressing is structural. Across much of sub-Saharan Africa, credit data is held by multiple bureaus and financial institutions in formats that do not communicate with each other. Lenders — particularly microfinance institutions, digital credit providers, and neobanks that have expanded rapidly on the back of mobile money adoption — are often left making underwriting decisions with partial or inconsistent information. The result is higher default rates, tighter lending criteria, or both.
East Africa presents a version of this problem with particular intensity. Mobile money infrastructure is more mature in markets such as Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania than in many parts of West Africa, but credit bureau coverage remains uneven and data standardisation is limited. Fintech lenders that want to operate across multiple East African markets typically face bespoke integration work in each country.
CreditChek’s argument is that a single, aggregated API layer — one that absorbs the complexity of dealing with multiple data sources — removes that friction for lenders. The company plans to use the new capital to deepen integrations with banks, microfinance institutions, and fintech lenders across the region.
Investor rationale
Janngo Capital, which led the round, manages what it describes as the largest gender-equality-focused technology fund in Africa and typically writes tickets of up to €5 million. The firm’s founder, Fatoumata Bâ, cited the scale of Africa’s MSME financing gap — estimated at $331 billion — as part of the rationale for backing CreditChek. Janngo’s portfolio includes Sabi, the Nigerian B2B commerce platform, and Expensya, the expense management company. The firm was named among TIME’s 100 Most Influential Companies in 2025.
For Janngo, the investment fits a recurring thesis: that gaps in financial infrastructure — rather than a lack of demand for credit — are the primary constraint on lending to small businesses and individuals across the continent.
What comes next
CreditChek’s East Africa expansion will test whether a model proven in Nigeria, one of Africa’s largest single markets, can translate to a region with different regulatory environments, more fragmented data ecosystems, and varied levels of institutional readiness. The company has not disclosed which East African markets it will enter first or the timeline for doing so.
The broader credit infrastructure space in Africa has attracted increasing investor attention. Companies such as Mono, Okra, and Stitch have built open finance rails in specific markets, while credit bureau operators including TransUnion and Creditinfo have expanded their African footprints. CreditChek’s positioning — aggregating across sources rather than building primary data assets — puts it in a distinct but adjacent part of the value chain.
Whether $600,000 is sufficient to execute a meaningful East African expansion will depend heavily on the depth of existing integrations the company can leverage and how quickly it can sign up lenders in new markets. The company has not indicated whether a follow-on round is planned.