Chipper Cash, the startup that provides a platform for people to send cash across African borders easily has raised more money.
According to TechCrunch, the startup has raised a $6 million seed round that was led by Deciens Capitall.
Chipper Cash intends to use the influx of capital to grow its team and move to new areas. “Southern Africa is an area we’re looking to expand in 2020,” Ham Serunjogi, Chipper Cash CEO said.
The seed round follows a $2.4 million raise the company did back in May of 2019 that was led by Deciens Capital, 500 Startups and Liquid 2 Ventures.
Apparently Chipper Cash has more than 600,000 active users and has processed over 3 million transactions.
Their latest seed round also follows their big move to Nigeria, which is arguably Africa’s largest fintech market. The country has close to 200 million people and this is sweet fodder for companies. Chipper Cash move to countries like South Africa will make it the seventh country they operate in, after Kenya, Ghana, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Nigeria.
The fintech scene in Africa has seen a huge funding raise this year. OPay, Opera’s fintech arm raised $120 million recently in a Series B funding for expansion. Visa also announced that they were acquirng a 20% stake in a Nigerian based fintech company, Interswitch. Last month, Transsion, the company that owns TECNO and Infinix also launched PalmPay thanks to a $40 million investment raised by them and Mediatek.
2020 will be an interesting year to witness the continued pumping of millions of dollars in funding to grow these fintech companies. We have a lot of unbanked and underbanked populations in the country and Kenya’s own MPESA has revealed the massive opportunities it unlocked by doing just that. However, the new generation fintech companies are crossing borders and this will unlock even more opportunities for them.
