A Life Update, our First Events and an African Giant

Hey hey!

Last week I was moving house and couldn’t get the newsletter out.

But, here with a life update. 🥁

I’ve packed up my room in Melbourne, Australia into three boxes and moved out.

Why?

So I that I can travel around Africa for the rest of the year 🌍

It’s been over two years since I’ve been on the continent and I’ve been itching to get back.

On the way there I’ll be taking a couple detours and hosting two Africa Tech Meetups 🎉

🇸🇬 Singapore - 16th September - Link here

🇬🇧 London - 23th September - Link here

If you’re in either of these cities then come along and say hi 👋🏾

And feel free to reach out for a coffee - I’d love to meet up to jam about Africa and absorb all of your local travel tips 🙌🏾

In case you forgot since last fortnight, this newsletter will get you smarter on Africa’s tech scene in under 5 minutes. Maybe 7 if you’re a slow reader 🐢

If you haven’t already, you can subscribe to get this in your inbox weekly below 👇🏾

This week we’ll be diving into one of my favourite companies on the continent, Chipper Cash.

Chipper Cash is one of Africa’s biggest peer-to-peer payment platforms, and Africa’s second biggest unicorn.

The Problem

Africa’s banking systems are rigid and expensive to use, and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has the highest transaction costs anywhere in the world.

Over 80% of African cross-border payment transactions are routed offshore for clearing and settlement, using third-party banks usually outside the continent.

With over 1000 banks and 12 card networks across Africa’s 54 countries, the cost of transferring money cross border is still high and takes a long time to process.

Chipper Cash built a mobile layer that users can transfer funds into. Through Chipper, users can pay directly, peer to peer and receive funds in minutes.

The Founders

Ham Serunjogi, from Uganda, is CEO and Maijid Moujaled, who grew up in Ghana is CTO. The pair met at Grinnell College in Iowa.

Early on, they moved in together and combined their life savings ($30,000) to use as seed capital.

When they tried to raise funds they were asked ‘Why don’t you go look for donations and grants to fund this?’ 🤦🏾‍♂️

Traction

Since launching in 2018, Chipper Cash is live in 9 countries → the US, the UK, Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya.

Chipper now has over 5m users, processing 80,000 transactions daily and adding more than 40,000 users daily.

Nearly 1% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s 600m+ people using mobile phones have a Chipper Cash account.

Funding

After pitching to over 50 VC firms in 2018, Chipper Cash raised $150k from 500 Startups. With this funding they reached 70,000 users and 250k transactions.

For comparison, Robinhood raised three rounds (a total of $16m in funding) before they launched their app to the public.

Due to the struggle to fill seed and pre-seed rounds, founders in Africa are highly capital efficient and have stronger early metrics.

This is why pre-seed and seed stage startups are the biggest venture opportunity on the continent - if you understand the local context.

To date, Chipper Cash has raised over $302 million and is valued at $2.2 billion from investors like Ten13, Deciens, Tribe Capital, Bezos Expeditions, One Way Ventures, 500 Startups, Ribbit Capital and FTX.

I’m excited to see what the future holds for Chipper Cash, an African Giant and one of the continent’s biggest success stories to date.

And that’s a wrap for this week! Do you have another startup in Africa you want me to cover? Let me know via email.

If you enjoyed this and know someone else who might, please share it with them!

Catch you all next week 👋🏾

Caleb