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Two weeks ago a Kenyan fintech provider PULA was among 20 finalists pitching at the Singapore Fintech Festival. The presentation by the CTO Sitati Kituyi was selected among the winners, enabling the company to walk away with a cash prize of USD 50,000, getting an exclusive opportunity for networking with investors and a fast-tracked application for the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Financial Sector Technology and Innovation (FSTI) Proof-of-Concept Scheme. Pula ‘restructures agricultural insurance and seeks to use technology to insure the previously unbanked, uninsured and untapped market of smallhodlers across the globe. It facilitates crop and livestock insurance coverage and works with Fortune 500 companies, global NGOs, research institutions, and governments to help provide smallholders the protection they need in an increasingly unpredictable market.’ The finalists who eventually pitched for the Global Fintech Hackcelerator were selected through two parallel scouting programmes. The local programme which aimed to tackle problem statements originating from the financial industry in Singapore and the broader Asia region saw 10 winners shortlisted from among 200 submissions by companies across 30 countries.

The future is really exciting for us and links into why we participate in these fintech festivals. We think what we’ve proven in South Africa is scalable to other markets, especially those with similar setup to South Africa five years ago. Our focus is largely on emerging markets and seeking to partner our capability into a market opportunity, where the partner brings local knowledge and regulatory understanding and we bring platform capability. There needs to be a level of maturity and fintech support that enables our business model. There must be a very strong payments layer and smartphone penetration rates must be good. If those are in place and there’s a low propensity for retail stock investors to be investing in the local stock market, we start to be interested.

We work across Africa and Asia, and in 2019 alone, we facilitated crop and livestock insurance cover to 1.1mln farmers and have offered our products in 11 markets from Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique. Since starting in 2015 our products have reached over 3.4mln households. Our Founders work in insurance has been recognized by several international awards including the Financial Times/IFC Award for Sustainable Finance, the Singapore Fintech Festival, Womens World Banking, Credit Suisse, and InsureTech3.0.

Funding Pula: Insuretech Startup Closes $6M Series A Funding to Scale Up Business Across Africa 0 SharesShareTweetSharePin The African Insuretech service provider, Pula, has recently closed a US$6 million Series A funding round led by TLcom Capital and had participation from Women’s World Banking. It specializes in digital as well as agric insurance to derisk smallholder farmers across Africa. This new round of investment to the insuretech startup will be used to scale up operations in the company’s existing 13 markets across Africa. Pula has so far impacted over 4.3 million farmers on the continent and the new funding will help push its expansion into Asia to power resilience and profitability for Asian smallholder farmers. Pula was launched by Rose Goslinga and Thomas Njeru in 2015, to design and deliver innovative agricultural insurance and digital products to help smallholders farmers improve their farming practices, endure climate risks and bolster their incomes. This has become necessary because for smallholder farmers in emerging markets, the traditional method of calculating insurance through farm visits is often expensive, meaning they are often neglected from financial protection against climate risks.