Pngme
“Can alternative financial-data infrastructure unlock credit decisioning for the 400M+ credit-invisible consumers and MSMEs across African and South Asian emerging markets?”
Founded 2019 by Brendan Playford as a credit/lending API for thin-file Sub-Saharan African consumers, originally piloting direct lending products (e-float loans with ReadyCash). Pivoted to a pure data-infrastructure play after the 2021 Series A, positioning as financial data aggregation + ML feature engineering for banks and fintechs. Founder Playford then spun out Masa Finance in 2020 as a separate decentralized credit-bureau venture. By 2026 Pngme has narrowed to a B2B data-infrastructure SaaS — Universal Data Ingester, Automated Feature Building, and a new Synthetic Data Store — explicitly disclaiming that it is not a US consumer reporting agency.