South African-based fintech Tyme Group has attained unicorn status after securing $250 million in a Series D funding round.
The new funding led by Nu Holdings, which owns Latin America’s largest fintech, NuBank, pushes Tyme’s valuation to $1.5 billion. M&G Catalyst Fund and other existing shareholders also participated in the round.
A Vote of Confidence For Tyme Group
“It is a unique vote of confidence in our business by the world leaders in our industry, essentially,” Coenraad Jonker, chief executive officer and co-founder of Tyme, said in an interview with Bloomberg.
Founded in 2019, the fintech operates a hybrid digital banking model that combines online banking with physical service offices. It has over 10 million users in South Africa, where it is known as TymeBank and operates as a digital bank. Meanwhile, it is headquartered in Singapore as Tyme.
The company focuses on building and scaling digital banks in emerging markets by offering checking and savings accounts with debit cards, credit via buy now, pay later schemes, and cash advances. It says it has 15 million customers across its two South Africa and the Philippines markets.
The company is known as GoTyme in the Philippines where it has 5 million users. It launched in the Asian country in 2022 in partnership with local conglomerate Gokongwei Group.
Tyme claims it has raised over $400 million in customer deposits and extended more than $600 million in financing to small businesses across both markets.
The fintech platform plans to expand further into Vietnam and Indonesia next year. Furthermore, according to Jonker, Tyme is eyeing an IPO in New York by 2028, with plans for a secondary listing in South Africa.
Tyme, founded by chairman Coen Jonker, remains majority-owned by South African billionaire Patrice Motsepe’s African Rainbow Capital (ARC), which owns a 40% stake in the company. Nu Holdings, which led the latest funding, invested $150 million for a 10% stake. Meanwhile, M&G Catalyst Fund invested $50 million.
Some current investors in the fintech startup are Tencent Holdings, Gokongwei Group, Norrsken22, The Ethos AI Fund, Apis Growth Fund II (‘Apis’), British International Investment (BII), and more.
A Recovering Investment Landscape
The funding round, which takes Tyme’s total capital raised to almost $600 million, marks a notable recovery in investor interest in fintechs after a slowdown caused partly by rising interest rates worldwide.
Tyme joins Nigeria’s Moniepoint as one of the few African fintechs to achieve unicorn status this year. The others are MNT-Halan, Interswitch, Flutterwave, Chipper, OPay, Wave, and Andela.
Nubank’s investment in Tyme aligns with its broader strategy to diversify geographically and tap into the growth potential of emerging markets outside Latin America.
While Nubank has consolidated its position as a dominant player in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, with over 100 million customers, its core markets are becoming increasingly competitive as rivals like Neon and C6 Bank vie for market share.
“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 South-East Asia. We are excited to work with Tyme to share many of our learnings of scaling this model to hundreds of millions of customers,” says David Vélez, founder and CEO of Nubank.
Main Image: TymeBank Ambassadors standing by a kiosk for shoppers to open bank accounts. Image Credit: TymeBank
