African fintech Moniepoint has closed new funding worth $110 million. The company has won over Google's Africa Investment Fund as a new investor in its Series C round led by Development Partners International's African Development Partners (ADP) III fund.
The other investors included African private equity firm Verod Capital and existing investor Lightrock.

Moniepoint, which has QED Investors, British International Investment (BII), and Endeavor Catalyst as backers, has raised more than $180 million since it was founded in 2015.

The round turns Moniepoint into a unicorn — a private company valued at $1 billion or more, the Financial Times says. The African fintech was last valued at nearly $800 million in a QED-led round two years ago.

Initially, Moniepoint had infrastructure and payment solutions for banks and financial institutions. Now it has turned into a business banking provider, and there it has achieved some extraordinary success.

The African fintech caters to SMBs across Nigeria, providing them with working capital, business expansion loans, and management tools like expense management or business payment cards, accounting and bookkeeping solutions, and insurance.

The fintech reports that it processed over 800 million transactions; the total value of its monthly transactions has exceeded $17 billion.

It says that new funding will help it 'accelerate growth across the rest of Africa, where some 90% of its business currently comes from Nigeria, into digital payments, banking, foreign exchange, credit, and business management tools. Ninety percent of its 900,000 customers operate outside Nigeria. The firm just entered the personal bank account market and claims the past year saw twentyfold growth in customers.