The Journey so Far: Salad Africa 2025

2024 was a pivotal year for us at Salad, marked by significant growth, valuable lessons, and important milestones. Most notably we evolved our business model to focus on providing lending infrastructure that empowers digital platforms to offer digital loans to SMEs, while also enabling lenders to effectively risk assess and finance these businesses.

Our new direction is a bold one but we are proud to be play our part in bridging the credit gap for underserved SMEs in Africa.

Growth and Partnerships in 2024

The growth we experienced in 2024 was partly due to the partnerships we secured with digital marketplaces and platforms like Lifebank, Cutstruct, Tyms, Kitovu, just to name a few.

We also built relationships with five commercial banks and three CBN-regulated financial institutions.

By collaborating with digital platforms to originate loan requests and connecting them with lenders to finance these loans, we're creating a seamless ecosystem that empowers SMEs with access to credit.

Here's a summary of the growth we experienced in the previous year:

1. Value of credit disbursed grew by 453% and revenue by 308%
2. 50% of our annual revenue came in the last four months of the year, indicating a promising product-market fit for our revised direction
3. Our ability to finance loan requests through 3rd party partners increases our access to capital and reduces overall credit risk.
4. Our collection rate remains at 99.9%

Highs from 2024

1. We received equity investment from Full Moon Equity Ventures
2. In August 2024, we transformed our offering to meet evolving market needs, transitioning from payroll backed lending, to providing embedded lending infrastructure for digital platforms to offer fully digital loans to their SME users
3. Shortly after our transition, Salad emerged as one of the winners at the much publicized 2024 Zenith Bank pitch competition, for our innovative approach to unlocking credit for an underserved SME segment, and potential use case for AI to drive financial inclusion.

Looking ahead in 2025

In 2025, we plan to take our embedded finance infrastructure to new heights by exploring artificial intelligence and virtual bank accounts and working with existing and new lenders and financial institutions.

There are global companies offering a similar or identical value proposition to Salad in other markets. These companies exemplify the potential of the embedded finance industry while affirming Salad's product roadmap.

The companies we've been following very keenly are R2, YouLend, Parafin, and Bankxware. Drawing insights from their customer base and product use case, combined with live feedback from our own market, we've sharpened our GTM strategy to target online marketplaces and B2B SaaS platforms that cater to SME users.

Final words

Thank you for reading about our journey so far, but more importantly, thank you for supporting our vision.

Please follow us on LinkedIn for real-time updates on new partnerships, product features and general company information.