The company has onboarded nearly 5,000 customers since beta launching in April 2021

Kenya’s Delila Kidanu teamed up with Alexis Roman and Bubunyo Nyavor last year to start Koa to help Kenyans save and invest their money better. Kidanu is the COO of the company, while Roman and Nyavor act as the CEO and CTO, respectively.

Apart from being offline models, savings with microfinance banks, cooperatives and informal saving groups have manual, expensive and opaque processes.

Digitally, some banks offer savings products to Kenyans. But Koa still sees an opportunity because banks are generally a less popular savings destination for an average Kenyan, as evident in the aforementioned stats.

The founders are banking that it will be different with Koa. Its first product is a savings app that allows consumers to deposit, save and earn interest on their money. When users log into the app, they can begin to create savings goals in different pockets, a replica of what exists offline, where users would normally save across different informal savings groups for various reasons.

Since beta launching in April 2021, the company has onboarded nearly 5,000 customers who use its savings product. But with savings being the lowest-hanging fruit for fintech apps, Roman says the plan for Koa is to offer more products along the line.

For one, Roman sees promise in offering embedded finance and banking-as-a-service tools that would enable other startups to launch fintech products at a faster pace. And given Koa’s entry point with savings, Roman believes the company is poised to build the rails of digital financial services in the country.

Ultimately the plan is to become a digital banking platform that offers other services like lending and investments.

While we offer direct to consumer savings apps, we can then turn around and go to other companies to help them offer savings or other financial products to their customers. They wouldn’t have to go through all the struggles and burdens through regulatory hoops if we can help them achieve that, he said. In the long run, we want to become a digital financial institution.

Alongside savings, Koa also provides financial and educational content for users to help with engagement. Users on the platform have now saved more than $40,000 and Roman says the company is heading toward a double-digit growth week-on-week in both users and deposits. Koa also recently raised an undisclosed pre-seed investment from angel investors across Africa, Europe and the U.S.