African cross-platform Fintech startup – Chipper Cash – has raised $30 million in Series B funding round.
The seed funding round was led by Ribbit Capital, with participation of Bezos Expeditions — the personal VC fund of Jeff Bezos – CEO of Amazon Inc.
The San Francisco based across the border African Fintech startup was founded in 2018 by Ham Serunjogi and Majid Moujaled, of Ugandan and Ghanaian nationality respectively, while studying at Grinnel College in Iowa, USA.
The partners were able to convince about 500 startups and a couple of notable personalities to invest in their startup.
Prior to this round of funding, the fintech start-up has been able to raise about $22 million which has so far been channeled into no-fee, mobile based P2P payment services in Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Rwanda, and Tanzania.
Aside running its P2P app, Chipper Cash also runs Chipper Checkout, which is a merchant-focused, fee-based payment product that generates the revenue to support Chipper Cash’s free mobile-money business.
The start-up has been able to amass about 3 million users, and processes up to 80,000 transactions in a day.
With the series B funding, the startup plans to expand its products and coverage area, as well as offering more business payment solutions, crypto-currency trading options, and investment services.
Chipper Cash co-founder, Serunjogi told TechCrunch that Chipper Cash will “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,”
One of the products the start-up is running on beta is the option to allow its users buy and sell Bitcoin, as well as invest in U.S. stocks from Africa, through a partnership with U.S. financial services company, DriveWealth.
“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.