Sote

Sote: A data and analytics fitnech company enabling banks and FI's to lend to corporates and SME's based on proprietary trade data (Moody's for Africa). Sote’s mission was to make trade more accessible across Africa. The continent faces a $100B trade loan deficit among medium and large businesses, primarily due to reliance on tangible real estate as the main form of collateral. By building a Moody's-like platform for African financial institutions, we aimed to reduce the continent’s dependency on real estate collateral for trade loans, a finite resource. This would make trade loans more accessible and help ignite sustainable economic growth at scale. We achieved $7.2m annualized revenue, moving more than $20m GMV in 700 TEU containers per month. We raised $10m from various sv vc firms including Backstage Capital and Social Capital. Our platform consisted of two core solutions. Sote Logistics and Sote Capital. A collective team of 70+ multi-disciplined professionals, we enabled banks to make high-value credit decisions ($250k–$10m) across the trade finance lifecycle based on data from the Sote Capital dashboard and our collateralization systems. Sote, Swahili for 'all of us'.