NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Matt Flannery says that when he set out to start peer-to-peer lender Kiva more than ten years ago, he didn’t realize at first that he was building a non-profit. A host of banking laws and tax exemptions later, he helped build Kiva into an organization that paid out $800 million in loans to people who wouldn’t get help from traditional banks across 80 countries.

For his new concept of a “branchless bank,” Flannery’s going the startup route with some of Silicon Valley’s best known investors. His concept for a mobile-first digital bank for developing markets, called Branch, has raised $9.2 million in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz as well as seed investors Khosla Impact and Joe Lonsdale’s Formation 8 second fund. The money will help Branch’s team of six in San Francisco and more than 30 in Kenya expand into a second country, Tanzania, then launch in Uganda later this year.