BRANCH INTERNATIONAL

Flannery co-founded Kiva back in 2005. It was a nonprofit that let people fund small loans to entrepreneurs in poor countries.

He ran it for years. But nonprofits move slow and live off donations.

In 2015 he teamed up with Daniel Jung to build Branch. The idea was simple.

Instead of asking a stranger to fund a loan, use software to decide who gets one. The app looks at data already sitting on a borrower's smartphone.

Call logs, texts, GPS, how they use apps. From that it builds a credit score for people who have never had a bank account.

Then it hands out the loan on the spot.

Branch is a bank that lives entirely inside your phone. There are no branches.

That is the whole point of the name. People download the app, get approved using their phone data, and receive a small loan in minutes.

Branch makes money the way any lender does. Interest and fees on the cash it lends out.

The borrowers are the customers who pay. Over time it added savings, bill payments, and a Visa card.

The goal is to be the only money app someone in an emerging market ever needs.

The core product is the instant microloan, approved by an app reading your phone. Around it Branch built a wallet for savings and bill payments.

After the 2019 Visa deal it added card and payment features. In every market the pitch is the same.

Fast money and basic banking for people the big banks ignore.

Branch started in Kenya, where mobile money was already huge thanks to M-Pesa. That gave it rails to send and collect cash without a bank in the middle.

From there it spread to Nigeria, Tanzania, and India. The big move came in 2019.

Visa invested and partnered up, which pushed Branch from a pure lending app toward a full digital bank. Machine learning did the heavy lifting.

Every repaid loan taught the model who to trust next.

Lending to people with no credit history is risky. Some do not pay back.

And the whole app-lending sector has taken heat from regulators. In Kenya especially, digital lenders got hammered over high interest rates and aggressive debt collection.

Branch has to prove it can make money without becoming the kind of lender that traps people. Default risk, currency swings, and shifting rules across four countries make that a hard line to walk.

Andreessen Horowitz backed Branch early and led its 2016 Series A. Trinity Ventures led the $70 million Series B in 2018.

The headline raise came in 2019. Foundation Capital and Visa co-led a $170 million Series C.

The International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank, put money in too. That mix of Silicon Valley money and a global payments giant told everyone Branch was serious about emerging markets.