African Fintech startup Chipper Cash lands USD18m funding

In a report by Tech Crunch, African cross border fintech company Chipper Cash has closed a Series A USD$18.3 Million fund led by a venture capital group called Deciens Capital.

Background

Chipper was founded by Ham Serunjogi from Uganda and Ghanaian Maijid Moujaled in 2018.  They met in America at University before they went on to work in Silicon Valley. Serunjogi had a stint at Facebook and Moujaled worked for Yahoo

Serunjogi and Moujaled, according to Crunch Base, were able to convince venture capital groups Liquid 2 and 500 Startups to be their seed funders.

The investors have rolled in since:

• June 28, 2019 – Chipper cash received USD$60 000.00 from Catalyst fund.
• December 16, 2019 – Chipper raised USD$6 million from Deciens Capital for expansion into South Africa.

So what is Chipper Cash?

Chipper Cash is an app that allows users to send money domestically and across borders. The app is available in Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, South Africa, Rwanda, and Kenya on the App and Google Play Store. The best thing about this service is that in-border person to person transfers don’t carry any charges.

Competition on the continent

Chipper has placed itself in a very good position. The package is attractive, and they have the funding to go further. They however face competition from companies like Palmpay and Opay (owned by Opera) who have both received sizeable investment from Chinese backers. They are also going up against Nigeria’s Paga, which in March partnered with Visa and has a user base of 14 million.

Fintech in Africa

Fintech is one of Africa’s largest Venture Capital backed sectors. Figures for 2019 are a little confusing because Partech has given a value of USD$2 billion, Wee Tracker estimates USD$1.3 billion and Disrupt Africa puts the figure around USD$496 million.

Whatever the true numbers may be, venture capital investment drives innovation. Fintech and other startups need investment in order for those with the ideas that might address the problems in Africa the opportunity to solve them.

In this case, Africa has many unbanked individuals and informal traders. A company like Chipper Cash offering a service with no charges for local transactions makes the proposition less daunting.