Kenyan fintech startup, Flowt, has secured an undisclosed pre-seed funding round to expand its AI-powered financial intelligence platform, which is designed to help climate-smart businesses across Africa gain easier access to working capital.
Founded by Elana Laichena and headquartered in Nairobi, Flowt uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyse business accounting records and bank transactions, transforming fragmented financial information into reliable data that lenders can use to assess borrowers.
The startup’s first financing facility has gone to GreenBay, a Kenyan circular-commerce company whose expansion has been constrained by its inability to hold enough inventory.
The investment, secured from Delta40 Fund I, Impacc and Argidius Foundation, will support Flowt’s expansion across Kenya.
“Flowt lends against verified transaction history,” Laichena said, arguing that this approach can make working capital “both fast and affordable.”
What is Flowt and What Does It Do?
Flowt is a Kenyan financial technology startup building an AI-powered system that helps lenders understand the financial health of small businesses.
Rather than depending mainly on traditional lending requirements such as physical collateral, lengthy paperwork and extensive due diligence, the company examines the financial information businesses already generate through their normal operations.
Its technology analyses accounting systems and bank statements, compares financial records against actual transactions and produces a clearer picture of a company’s cash movement, financial position and ability to repay debt.
In practical terms, Flowt acts as a bridge between businesses that need financing and lenders that need reliable information before releasing funds. Its objective is to make smaller businesses more visible and understandable to financial institutions.
As founder Elana Laichena explained, “nobody can see trustworthy numbers,” and Flowt seeks to address that information gap by using verified transaction data to support lending decisions.
What Problem is Flowt Trying to Solve?
Flowt is targeting a fundamental problem facing many small and growing businesses in Africa, access to affordable working capital.
Businesses may have customers, viable products and strong growth prospects but still struggle to obtain loans because they lack sufficient collateral or a long enough operating history.
From the lender’s perspective, investigating a small business can also be expensive and time-consuming, making relatively small loans less attractive.
Laichena described the situation as leaving funders with “three bad options”, demand collateral the business does not possess, spend months conducting due diligence or assume the business is risky and charge an interest rate it cannot afford.
According to her, “All three are responses to the same problem, which is that nobody can see trustworthy numbers.”
Flowt’s approach is therefore centred on making reliable financial information available quickly enough to allow lenders to make more informed and potentially cheaper financing decisions.
GreenBay Becomes Flowt’s First Financing Case
GreenBay provides an early example of the problem Flowt is attempting to address.
The Kenyan company operates a circular-commerce business focused on home appliances, solar equipment and other products.
It sources pre-owned and second-life equipment, tests and refurbishes the products, and resells them to households and small businesses at more affordable prices.
However, its ability to grow was restricted by working capital. Simply put, GreenBay could sell more products if it could afford to hold more inventory. Yet its relatively young age and customer base made conventional bank financing difficult to secure.
Flowt took a different approach by integrating with GreenBay’s Odoo business-management system and independently verifying its financial activity through AI and machine-learning analysis of bank statements.
This enabled Flowt to assess GreenBay’s financial position, cash movements and repayment capacity within days rather than months, using evidence generated through the company’s ordinary trading activities.
How Flowt’s AI-Powered Lending Model Works
The distinguishing feature of Flowt’s model is that artificial intelligence is not being used merely as a marketing label; it is central to the financial assessment that enables the lending process.
The platform reads a company’s existing financial records, extracts relevant information from accounting systems and bank statements, and checks the information against itself to identify a reliable picture of the business.
This can help lenders determine whether reported sales correspond with actual cash inflows and whether a business generates sufficient cash to service a loan.
The approach could also reduce the cost of assessing smaller businesses, potentially making smaller financing facilities more attractive to lenders.
The company argues that this is particularly relevant to climate-smart enterprises, where financing has often concentrated on larger projects because smaller transactions can be expensive to evaluate.
Flowt’s proposition is that faster and more accurate financial analysis can lower that barrier and allow more smaller businesses to access capital.
New Funding to Drive Expansion Across Kenya
Flowt’s undisclosed pre-seed funding was secured from Delta40 Fund I, Impacc and Argidius Foundation, giving the young startup additional resources to develop and expand its model.
The company plans to deploy more capital to businesses across Kenya while continuing to build what it describes as a financial intelligence layer capable of making smaller businesses more “legible” to lenders.
The funding comes as Flowt seeks to demonstrate that technology can improve the relationship between financial institutions and underserved businesses without completely abandoning the need for risk assessment.
Its early work with GreenBay provides an initial demonstration of that proposition. GreenBay has already used Flowt’s financing to purchase and sell additional inventory and has begun repayments through its Flowt wallet.
The wallet also separates purchasing and collections from ordinary operating expenses, creating greater financial discipline and giving Flowt clearer visibility into the business’s cash flows.
What Could this Mean for Africa’s Climate-Smart Businesses
Flowt’s broader significance lies in its attempt to address two challenges simultaneously, the financing gap confronting small African businesses and the difficulty of funding smaller climate-related enterprises.
Climate-smart businesses often require capital to expand operations, purchase equipment, increase inventory or serve more customers, but their financing needs may be too small to attract traditional investment or justify lengthy lender assessments.
By using AI to analyse financial information more quickly, Flowt hopes to reduce the cost of understanding these businesses and make smaller financing opportunities more viable.
However, the model will ultimately have to prove that automated financial analysis can consistently distinguish promising businesses from genuinely high-risk borrowers.
Its early financing of GreenBay is therefore important, but it represents only an initial test. Flowt’s real challenge will be demonstrating that its approach can scale responsibly while keeping financing affordable and maintaining sufficiently strong safeguards against lending losses.
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