Company profile

BFREE is a technology-driven ethical credit management company that acquires and manages distressed consumer loan portfolios for lenders across Africa. Through conversational AI-driven tools, BFREE lets borrowers set their own repayment plans, automating the large majority of customer interactions, keeping recovery to terms borrowers can actually meet. Alongside buying portfolios outright, it licenses collections workflow software and secondary-debt-market analytics to lenders that run recovery in-house, having managed loan portfolios worth over $500 million.

Why we invested

In mature markets, collections rely on a formal economy and an infrastructure that has had decades to digitalise and mature. In Africa, that infrastructure barely exists. The consequences of this extend beyond individual lenders. Traditional banks and digital lenders usually struggle not only to recover bad debt but to reconcile it. And when collections fail at scale, the damage spreads through the whole system. Confidence drains out of it. Lenders pull back, restricting credit to the individuals and small businesses that need it most. We invested in BFREE because they are restoring this confidence.

BFREE is built on the premise that credit recovery can be less time-consuming, less expensive, and more ethical when it is fully digital. And what convinced us was that the founders did not learn this from the outside. Julian, Chukwudi, and Moses met running collections inside one of the continent's largest digital lenders. They lived inside the broken model, felt exactly where it failed, borrower by borrower, and left to build the solution they had wished existed.

Their technology impressed us just as much. It uses machine learning and behavioural data to recover debt in a way that collections in this market never have. The model also compounds. Every portfolio BFREE resolves sharpens the behavioural engine that prices the next one, so the platform gets better with each person it helps become debt-free.

The timing only sealed it: banks and lenders across emerging markets now face mounting pressure to clear bad debt off their balance sheets, and BFREE is the way they do it. Founders who have lived the problem, a technology that improves the more it works, and a market that suddenly needs exactly this. We backed BFREE because the humane way to handle default turns out to be the efficient one too, and this team is building it where it is needed most, for everyone it will reach next.