BY AGENCIES
African cross-border startup Chipper Cash has raised $30 million ( or sh108 billion) Series B funding round led by Rabbit Capital alongside Bezos Expeditions, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Benzos personal VC fund.
Founded in San Francisco in 2018 by Ham Serunjogi (Ugandan) and Maijid Moujaled (Ghanaian), Chipper Cash operates a mobile-based, no fee, P2P payment service. The service is currently available in seven countries including; Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, South Africa, Kenya and Rwanda.
The company has scaled to 3 million users on its platform and processes an average of 80,000 transactions daily. In June 2020, Chipper Cash reportedly reached a monthly payments value of $100 million.
As part of the Series B raise, the startup plans to expand its products and geographic scope. On the product side, that entails offering more business payment solutions, crypto-currency trading options, and investment services.
“We’ll always be a P2P financial transfer platform at our core. But we’ve had demand from our users to offer other value services…like purchasing cryptocurrency assets and making investments in stocks,” Serunjogi told TechCrunch.
“We’ll launch [the stock product]in Nigeria first so Nigerians have the option to buy fractional stocks — Tesla shares, Apple shares or Amazon shares and others — through our app. We’ll expand into other countries thereafter,” said Serunjogi.
On the business financial services side, the startup plans to offer more API payments solutions. “We’ve been getting a lot of requests from people on our P2P platform, who also have business enterprises, to be able to collect payments for sale of goods,” explained Serunjogi.
Chipper Cash also plans to use its Series B financing for additional country expansion, which the company will announce by the end of 2021.
Jeff Bezos’s backing of Chipper Cash follows a recent string of events that has elevated the visibility of Africa’s startup scene. Over the past decade, the continent’s tech ecosystem has been one of the fastest growing in the world by year year-over-year expansion in venture capital and startup formation, concentrated in countries such as Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa.
TechCrunch
