It is raining capital in African fintech. Chipper Cash, founded by Ugandan Ham Serunjogi and Ghanaian Maijid Moujaled has raised $30 million funding led by Ribbit Capital with participation of Bezos Expeditions — the personal VC fund of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Chipper Cash was founded in San Francisco in 2018 and offers mobile-based, no fee, P2P payment services in seven countries: Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa and Kenya, TechCrunch reports.
Parallel to its P2P app, the startup also runs Chipper Checkout — a merchant-focused, fee-based payment product that generates the revenue to support Chipper Cash’s free mobile-money business. 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 reached a monthly payments value of $100 million, according to CEO Ham Serunjogi
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“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 on a call..
The African fintech space has been hot with global deals and investments. Recently, Paystack, a paytech in Nigeria, was sold to Stripe for more than $200 million.
This was my entry when Chipper Cash raised its last funding.
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It began in London with Circle which was backed by Goldman Sachs. Yes, Circle had made it possible for people to wire money from U.S. to England at zero fee and without erosion on exchange rate. Circle symbolized my near-zero marginal cost redesign where transaction and distribution costs become ZERO. When that happens, products can be offered for free. Here, it was international remittance.
But while we were thinking, it seems Nigerians could begin to enjoy that also. U.S.-based Chipper Cash, a startup which offers instant cross-border mobile money transfers in Africa via text messaging, is coming to town, to make zero-free cross border payment in Nigeria possible.
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