South African Fintech Tyme Raises $250m to Join Unicorn Club

The company now joins the club of African unicorns, with members like MNT-Halan, Interswitch, Flutterwave, Chipper, OPay, Wave, and most recently, Moniepoint, which hit the $1 billion valuation threshold in October.

Tyme plans for an initial public offering (IPO) by the end of 2028.

The funding round was led by Nu Holdings, the parent company of Nu Bank, Latin America’s most valuable fintech, which invested $150 million for a 10 per cent stake.

M&G Catalyst Fund and existing investors also participated in the round. The latest funding signals an investor return to investing in the continent after a slowdown in funding in the last two years.

Tyme Group operates through a hybrid model of online and physical banking, offering checking and savings accounts, debit cards, and buy-now-pay-later credit.

The fintech has 15 million customers and claims to have extended over $600 million in financing to small businesses in South Africa and the Philippines.

Tyme, which was founded by Mr Coen Jonker, remains majority-owned by Mr Patrice Motsepe, the president of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) through his African Rainbow Capital (ARC), which retains a 40 per cent stake in the company.

Nubank will be tapping the deal to extend its reach further outside of Latin America after it forayed into India in 2021.

According to Mr David Vélez, founder and CEO of Nubank, “Since the beginning of Nubank, we have believed that the future of financial services globally is of digitally-native companies. We have met dozens of teams across different geographies, and we think that Tyme Group is extremely well-positioned to be one of the digital bank leaders in Africa and Southeast Asia.

“We are excited to work with Tyme to share many of our learnings of scaling this model to hundreds of millions of customers,” he added.