Exclusive: Tiger Global leads $6.5M Monnai deal

Monnai, a startup providing consumer data insights for fintechs, raised a $6.5 million Series A, the company tells Axios exclusively.

Why it matters: Financial institutions are increasingly turning to alternative data sources to guide their decision-making, particularly in regions where financial data is hard to come by.

Details: Tiger Global led the round, and was joined by Better Tomorrow Ventures, which led the company’s seed round, 500 Global and Emphasis Ventures.

• The company has raised a total of $10 million since being founded in August 2021.

How it works: Through a single API, Monnai gives customers access to more than 350 different contextual insights from various alternative data sources.

• That includes data like social activity, employment, email, IP, payments, and e-commerce, according to founder and CEO Pierre Demarche.
• The company seeks to be a "single source of truth" for data that can be used for KYC/AML, trust and fraud risk, credit decisioning and collections optimization.

State of play: Monnai's business is global in nature, as it hopes to provide data insights in regions where financial data is particularly hard to come by.

• "Especially in emerging markets, the coverage of [credit] bureaus is very limited, let's say around 50% of the population," Demarche says.

• "That coverage is actually decreasing over time because new generations — like Gen Z and millennials — are all going online first and they don't necessarily open bank accounts."

Between the lines: The company already has customers in seven markets across Southeast Asia, India, Latin America and the U.S., which is one reason it decided to take investment from Tiger Global.

• "Tiger is one of the largest investors in fintech, and when it comes to markets like India, Southeast Asia and LatAm they are a very large investor, [so] we can definitely benefit from that," Demarche says.