Segovia.
Location
Pakistan, Kenya, Uganda
Sector
Social Protection
Type of Investment
Risk Capital
Project Stage
Length of Investment
2015-2020
Investment Overview
A $750,000 equity investment in Segovia, a software technology platform that radically improves the efficiency of aid by making it faster, cheaper, and more secure to transfer funds directly to vulnerable populations.
The Development Challenge
Cash transfers are a cost-effective, evidence-based means of enabling vulnerable people to meet basic needs in emergencies and to escape poverty. Yet identifying who should be paid, and integrating across the dozens of payment networks required to reach them, remains a slow, manual, risky process.
The Innovation
Segovia is a modern enterprise software company with a first-of-its-kind technology product to improve cash transfer services, aiming to increase the money received by poor beneficiaries by 20-30% by reducing diversions, transfer costs, and inefficiencies.
Our Investment
GIF’s $750,000 equity investment as part of Segovia’s Series A round aimed to enable Segovia to accelerate deployment of their technology across multiple development partners.
Investment Objective
To support the pathway to scale by growing its client base and lowering remittance costs through mobile payment technology.
Why we invested
Experienced team.
Segovia’s management team include the founders of cash transfer programme GiveDirectly and top IT talent from Yahoo, IBM, and Facebook. The company has also attracted an impressive roster of investors including Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn) and Arif Naqvi (founder and CEO of Abraaj group). GIF joined this roster of investors to support Segovia’s focus on the social benefit of its innovation as it scales and matures as a company.
Potential for impact at scale.
Given the evidence of impact of cash transfers and the large scale of the cash transfer industry (an estimated $100-$130 billion in 2015), Segovia’s impact at scale can be substantial and global if they gain even a small proportion of this market.
Segovia in numbers
Potential increase in money received by beneficiaries
GIF Equity Investment