African fintech startup Chipper Cash is on a mission to make money transfers more efficient for its consumers.
Chipper Cash — a payments company founded in San Francisco in 2018 — was created by Ugandan software developer Ham Serunjogi and Ghanaian Maijid Moujaled to provide mobile-based P2P financial services that would allow its users to move their money freely locally, across the continent, and around the world.
In addition to its app, the company also runs Chipper Checkout — a merchant-focused, fee-based payment product that generates the revenue to support Chipper Cash’s free mobile-money business, TechCrunch reports.
With operations in Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa, and Kenya, the startup company has scaled upwards of three million users on its platform and is working to operate in a global capacity.
According to TechCrunch, Chipper Cash recently raised a $30 million Series B funding round led by Ribbit Capital with participation from Bezos Expeditions — which is the personal VC fund of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
As part of this funding round, the startup has shared its plans to expand the company’s products scope to offer additional business payment solutions, crypto-currency trading options, and investment services.
“We’ll always be a P2P financial transfer platform at our core,” co-founder Serunjogi shared with TechCrunch. “But we’ve had demand from our users to offer other value services like purchasing cryptocurrency assets and making investments in stocks.”
The fintech startup plans to use its Series B funding for geographical expansion, which the company will confirm by the end of 2021.
Serunjogi believes that having the company backed by Bezos — a notable tech figure and the richest person in the world — will greatly benefit the startup’s future.
“It’s a big deal when a world class investor like Bezos or Ribbit goes out of their sweet spot to a new area where they previously haven’t done investments,” he said to TechCrunch. “Ultimately, the winner of those things happening is the African tech ecosystem overall, as it will bring more investment from firms of that caliber to African startups.”
Chipper Cash is reportedly the first African investment for Bezos’ personal VC fund, per Crunchbase data.
Bezos’ financial support comes on the heels of many recent events that have occurred to increase Africa’s world visibility. With fintech becoming Africa’s most-funded sector of the tech industry, the continent’s ecosystem will continue to vastly grow and multiple.
Chipper Cash is just one of many African startups set to brighten the future for the continent’s forward-thinking business models.
For more information about Chipper Cash, visit its website.
