Tyme Group, a South African fintech, has secured $250 million in a Series D round, pushing its valuation to $1.5 billion.

The funding was led by Nu Holdings, which owns Latin America’s most valuable fintech Nubank, investing $150 million for a 10% stake.

M&G Catalyst Fund invested $50 million, while existing shareholders provided the remaining $50 million.

Founded in 2019, Tyme Group operates a hybrid digital banking model that combines online banking with physical service touchpoints.

The Singaporean-headquartered Tyme focuses on building and scaling digital banks in emerging markets by offering checking and savings accounts with debit cards, credit via buy now, pay later schemes, and cash advances. It says it has 15 million customers across its two markets of South Africa and the Philippines.

Its South African brand, TymeBank, has 10 million users and has been a key driver of its growth. It has 5 million users of its Philippine brand, GoTyme, which it launched in 2022 in partnership with local conglomerate Gokongwei Group to enter Asia.

Tyme claims it has raised over $400 million in customer deposits and extended more than $600 million in financing to small businesses across both markets. The fintech plans to expand further into Vietnam and Indonesia next year.

Nubank’s interest outside LatAm

Tyme, founded by chairman Coen Jonker, remains majority owned by Patrice Motsepe’s African Rainbow Capital (ARC), which retains a 40% stake in the company.

The funding round, which takes Tyme’s total capital raised to nearly $600 million, marks a notable recovery in investor interest in fintechs after a slowdown caused partly by rising interest rates across the world. Tyme joins Nigeria’s Moniepoint as one of the few African fintechs to achieve unicorn status this year.

Tyme is eyeing an IPO in New York by 2028, with plans for a secondary listing in South Africa, according to Jonker.

For Nubank, its investment in Tyme aligns with its broader strategy to diversify geographically and tap into the growth potential of emerging markets outside Latin America.

While Nubank has cemented itself as a dominant player in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, with over 100 million customers, its core markets are becoming increasingly competitive as rivals like Neon and C6 Bank vie for market share.

“Since the beginning of Nubank, we have believed that the future of financial services globally is of digitally-native companies. We have met dozens of teams across different geographies, and we think that Tyme Group is extremely well-positioned to be one of the digital bank leaders in Africa and Southeast Asia. We are excited to work with Tyme to share many of our learnings of scaling this model to hundreds of millions of customers,” says David Vélez, founder and CEO of Nubank.

Tyme isn’t Nubank’s first deal outside Latin America. In 2021, the Brazilian fintech invested in the Indian neobank Jupiter.