Chipper Cash Raises $30M in Funding

African cross-border fintech company Chipper Cash has secured $30 million in Series B funding. This investment round was spearheaded by Ribbit Capital and included participation from Bezos Expeditions, the venture capital fund of Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos.

Established in San Francisco in 2018 by Ham Serunjogi, originally from Uganda, and Maijid Moujaled, from Ghana, Chipper Cash delivers mobile, no-fee, person-to-person payment services across seven African nations: Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa, and Kenya.

Alongside its P2P application, the company operates Chipper Checkout, a payment solution geared towards merchants. This fee-based product generates revenue that supports Chipper Cash’s free mobile-money services. Currently, the platform supports 3 million users and facilitates an average of 80,000 transactions each day. According to CEO Ham Serunjogi, the company processed $100 million in monthly payments as of June 2020.

The Series B funding will be used to broaden the company’s product offerings and expand its geographic reach. Planned product enhancements include additional business payment tools, cryptocurrency trading capabilities, and investment services.

“While we will continue to focus on P2P financial transfers, we’ve seen significant demand from our users for additional services…such as the ability to acquire cryptocurrency assets and invest in stocks,” Serunjogi stated in an interview with TechCrunch.

african fintech startup chipper cash raises $30m backed by jeff bezos

Chipper Cash has integrated beta features into its website and app, allowing users to buy and sell Bitcoin and invest in U.S. stocks from within Africa. The latter is made possible through a collaboration with U.S. financial services provider DriveWealth.

“We intend to launch [the stock investment product] initially in Nigeria, providing Nigerians with the opportunity to purchase fractional shares – including stocks in companies like Tesla, Apple, and Amazon – directly through our application. We will then extend this service to other countries,” Serunjogi explained.

Regarding business financial services, the company intends to introduce more API payment solutions. “We’ve received numerous requests from users of our P2P platform, who also operate businesses, to enable them to accept payments for goods sold,” Serunjogi clarified.

Chipper Cash also intends to utilize the Series B financing to further expand into new countries, with announcements expected by the end of 2021.

Jeff Bezos’s investment in Chipper Cash is part of a growing trend that has increased attention on Africa’s startup environment. The continent’s tech ecosystem has experienced rapid growth over the past decade, driven by increasing venture capital and startup creation, particularly in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa.

A key factor has been bringing Africa’s substantial unbanked and underbanked population, along with small and medium-sized enterprises, into the digital economy. Data from the World Bank indicates that approximately 66% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s 1 billion people lack access to a bank account.

Consequently, fintech has become the most heavily funded sector within Africa’s tech landscape, attracting a significant portion of the roughly $2 billion in venture capital invested in startups in 2019. Despite substantial growth in venture funding over the last decade, Africa’s tech scene previously saw limited major successes, with only one known unicorn (Jumia, an e-commerce venture) and few significant exits or public offerings. This situation began to change last year.

In April 2019, Jumia, backed by investors such as Goldman Sachs and Mastercard, became publicly listed on the NYSE. Later that year, Nigerian fintech company Interswitch achieved unicorn status following a $200 million investment from Visa.

This year, Network International acquired East African payments startup DPO for $288 million, and in August, WorldRemit completed the acquisition of Africa-focused remittance company Sendwave for $500 million.

A notable liquidity event in African tech occurred last month with Stripe’s acquisition of Nigerian payment gateway startup Paystack for a reported $200 million.

In a statement to TechCrunch, a spokesperson for Bezos Expeditions confirmed the fund’s investment in Chipper Cash but declined to provide further details regarding plans to invest in other African startups. According to Crunchbase data, this investment represents Bezos Expeditions’ first venture in Africa. It is important to note that Bezos Expeditions operates independently from Jeff Bezos’s primary business, Amazon.

For Chipper Cash, the $30 million Series B funding marks a significant milestone for the San Francisco-based payments company and its founders, Ham Serunjogi and Maijid Moujaled. The two met while studying at Grinnell College in Iowa before moving to Silicon Valley for roles at major tech companies: Facebook for Serunjogi and Flickr and Yahoo! for Moujaled.

Driven by the desire to build their own company, they launched Chipper Cash in 2018 and secured seed funding from 500 Startups and Liquid 2 Ventures – the latter co-founded by American football legend Joe Montana. The startup expanded into Nigeria and Southern Africa in 2019, established a payments partnership with Visa in April, and raised a $13.8 million Series A round in June.

Chipper Cash founder Ham Serunjogi believes that the support of a prominent tech investor like Jeff Bezos (the world’s wealthiest individual) offers advantages beyond the capital itself.

“When a world-class investor like Bezos or Ribbit ventures into a new area where they haven’t previously invested, it’s a significant development,” he said. “Ultimately, the African tech ecosystem as a whole benefits, as it attracts more investment from firms of that caliber to African startups.”