- Lidya, a Nigerian fintech company, is closing its operations in Poland and the Czech Republic three years after it started operating in these Eastern European countries.
- The news comes after the fintech company raised $8.3 million in pre-Series B funding in 2021 to strengthen its position in Nigeria, Poland, and the Czech Republic.
- The company plans to focus its recently launched credit assessment and loan recovery service, Lydia Collect, on the Nigerian market. Lydia Collect, as a last resort, allows linked lenders to debit the accounts of borrowers who have defaulted on their loans at other banks directly through the GSI system.
When Tunde Kehinde and Ercin Eksin founded Lidya in 2016, their goal was to assist small and medium-sized businesses with opening accounts, saving money, establishing credit profiles, and obtaining credit to expand their operations and meet personal needs.
Kehinde was also the co-founder of Jumia Nigeria, while Eksin was the former CEO of Jumia Nigeria and COO of Jumia Africa.
On why the company shut down operations in these markets, Tunde Kehinde, co-founder and CEO of Lidya, stated, “Nigeria’s tech-savvy lending ecosystem is the ideal launchpad for our solutions, which support data-driven decision-making.”
The company, which digitises and streamlines the credit assessment process to make it simpler for SMEs throughout Africa to obtain the capital they need to grow, raised $6.9 million in Series A funding in 2018 to expand its loan book. The funding came a year after it secured a $1.25 million seed.
In October 2019, the startup announced the launch of new lending operations in the Czech Republic and Poland. However, its operations in Eastern Europe didn’t start until March and April 2020.
Meanwhile, the co-founders, Kehinde and Ercin Eksin, previously founded a logistics company, Africa Courier Express (ACE.ng), before launching Lidya in 2016. ACE was a last-mile e-commerce delivery service that offered customers and businesses logistics solutions.
