Monnai Raises US$3.15 Million Seed Round To Create First Global Consumer Insight Infrastructure

A  global infrastructure provider for consumer insights, Monnai  has announced  its US$3.15 million seed round led by Better Tomorrow Ventures with participation from Commerce Ventures, Kearny Jackson and 9Yards Capital. This new round of funding marks the company’s 1-year anniversary and follows an initial pre-seed raised at the end of 2021 from 500 Global, Emphasis Ventures (EMVC) and Ginkgo Ventures who also participated in this round – bringing the total raised to-date amount to more than US$4 million.

Monnai is built for fintechs by experienced fintech professionals, providing a global infrastructure that delivers customer insights to financial organizations to make more accurate and informed decisions throughout the lifecycle of their customers.

Founded in 2021 by Pierre Demarche and Ravish Patel, Monnai has quickly emerged as the solution of choice for fintech firms looking to access a global integrated platform that helps them navigate the four key pillars of onboarding, trust and fraud risk, credit underwriting and debt collections.

Monnai’s platform includes four modules available through a single API: KYC, trust and fraud risk, credit decisioning and collections optimization. It leverages 350+ insights aggregated and standardized across trusted ecosystems of Identity, Digital, Communication, Device and Payments data partners.

With the emergence of many forms of innovative solutions across the entire fintech ecosystem, companies in this space are looking to innovate. The team at Monnai understands that the biggest need to achieve full market potential is access to critical infrastructure including effective credit bureaus, alternate data and standardized personal identification data.

“In a digital first world, every business is a fintech. While these innovations have global scale and applicability, the infrastructure supporting them is fragmented and siloed. There are a number of companies like credit bureaus or identity verification vendors in the US, however there is a lack of infrastructure available to businesses internationally, whether they are global or regional. The tools and data are often siloed into disparate solutions and across different markets. To grow, businesses need to leverage and consolidate better technology and data in the same platform, providing a ubiquitous approach to decisioning models,” said  Monnai CEO and cofounder, Pierre Demarche.

He added, “By using the right data from across the customer lifecycle through multiple sources, fintechs and merchants can create net new business in a way that is also beneficial for the consumers.”

From neo banks, digital payments and remittance to embedded finance and crypto based payments, there is an explosion of services targeting the digital customer across the globe with Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe rapidly emerging as the new innovation hubs. According to a report from Bain, in developing markets like in Southeast Asia, digital financial services could represent up to a US$60 billion opportunity by 2025, while India would represent a US$150 billion market today. As these fintechs look to innovate, the biggest need to achieve full market potential is access to critical infrastructure including effective credit bureaus, alternate data and standardized personal identification data.

“Building in the international markets is very different from the US markets, and Monnai was built to be global by design, leveraging the synergies between hyper local and global markets,” said general partner at Better Tomorrow Ventures, Sheel Mohnot. We are excited to partner with this team as they bring their unique expertise and relationships developing data and aggregation infrastructure across more than 40 countries.”

At the core of Monnai is the company’s commitment to building a default global infrastructure, providing businesses with an infrastructure that was created with global innovation and diversity in mind.

“International markets are challenging for fintechs. While there has been an exponential growth of digital data, merging data sources is very complex, disparate and probabilistic in nature, which makes it difficult for them to consume it without spending costly engineering resources and time,” said Monnai CPO and cofounder, Ravish Patel,. “Fintechs can connect to Monnai seamlessly through a single API creating orthogonal value in their consumer decisioning models. This instantly translates into better outcomes for them: Higher approval rates, increased customer lifetime value and reduced costs.”

The funding will be used for further development of the platform, new hires and continued global expansion.

Monnai currently has customers in India, Southeast Asia and Latin America, with plans to expand into North America later this year.