Yellow Card — an African Bitcoin exchange — is one of the continent’s trailblazers in cryptocurrency.
The company recently announced its raise of a $15 million Series A funding round led by Valar Ventures, Third Prime, and Castle Island Ventures. Square, Coinbase Ventures, and Blockchain.com Ventures were also participants in the round.
The announcement makes it the largest funding by a B2C crypto exchange in Africa, according to Forbes.
In the act for cryptocurrency accessibility, Yellow Card went from its initial launch by its founders — Chris Maurice and Justin Poiroux — in the U.S., to going live in Nigeria in June 2019.
“Yellow Card is a very diverse product; in different countries, we have slightly different modus operandi,” Yellow Card’s chief bitcoin officer Munachi Ogueke told Forbes. “But at the end of the day, the focus is still the same—we are bringing access to people that don’t have access to crypto and financial systems.”
The company currently operates in six countries as a crypto-based agency banking business and user growth has boosted “30X since the start of the pandemic,” Forbes reports. Yellow Card aims to turn into a crypto service that “allows Africans to send remittances, make payments and protect the value of their wealth against the incessant currency devaluation in many African countries.”
What will separate Yellow Card from other crypto services? The platform wants to build products that don’t require users to understand crypto, according to Forbes.
“The big picture is to change the way that money moves around the continent using crypto, and we want to make it easier for people to be able to just jump from their local economy into the economy of the internet and vice versa,” Maurice said.
Yellow Card plans to use its funding to grow its team, launch new products, and expand to more African countries across the continent.
