With an extensive professional career in several countries, he is certain that financial literacy is key to helping populations avoid debts. With Alvin Technologies, he is planning to do just that in Africa.

Winston Reid (photo) is a Kenyan entrepreneur who founded fintech startup Alvin Technologies in 2021. With its smart money management app, his startup helps users manage their income and savings. It helps them develop personalized budgeting plans, eliminate unnecessary expenditures, and monitor all the money outflows to avoid going into debt.  

Through Alvin Technologies, he also  provides banks and fintechs with “powerful API features to help them drive better customer engagement and money habits via their own apps.” 

The Diplomacy and Global Politics graduate (B.A. from the University of Miami in 2014) founded Alvin Technologies to improve financial literacy in Africa and give Africans tools to “balance their daily spending with their savings goals.” 

In January 2022, Alvin secured a US$740,000 pre-seed fund in a round led by Nigerian firm Ingressive Capital. With the secured funds, Winston Reid plans to hire more staff and boost Alvin Technologies’ positioning in Nigeria, in the second half of 2022.  

“We’re excited to have such mission-aligned partners and strategic angels onboard the Alvin journey to help us build an even more intuitive and powerful personal finance app for all of Africa faster and more efficiently. This capital will enable us to hire key personnel quickly and scale faster as we transition from the private beta stage of the Alvin App v1: Labrador to the first public version of Alvin later in the quarter,” Winston said. 

The techpreneur has over ten years of professional experience, in the finance sector mostly. In 2011, he joined Vector Marketing as a field sales advisor. Months later, he entered the communication industry as an English communication consultant for Shan Herald News Agency before notable positions in the agritech and edtech sectors in the U.S., Senegal, Nigeria, Thailand, and Kenya.  

Melchior Koba