Chipper Cash, a Ugandan mobile money payment firm based in Silicon Valley, has raised $6 million from Deciens Capital to fund its expansion into southern Africa.
After only a year in business, Chipper Cash claims to have processed 3 million transactions for more than 600,000 active users.
The mobile money payment firm was founded in 2018 by Ugandan CEO Ham Serunjogi and Ghanaian Maijid Moujaled. They both moved to the U.S. to study and work in Silicon Valley.
Serunjogi and Moujaled’s startup offers no-fee, person to person, cross-border mobile-money payments in Africa through its mobile app.
Chipper Cash chose San Francisco as its headquarters with offices in Africa to have access to venture capital and U.S. developers while also maintaining a presence in their key African markets.
In September 2019, Chipper Cash launched in Nigeria, the largest African economy. Already available in six African countries — Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya — the company is now targeting Southern Africa.
“Southern Africa is an area we’re looking to expand to in 2020,” CEO Serunjogi told TechCrunch on a call, choosing not to disclose which countries in the region Chipper Cash was targeting.
The southern African region is home to South Africa, the second-largest African economy. The transaction value for remittances in South Africa is expected to show a compound annual growth rate of 27.7 percent from 2019-2022, according to Statista.
That means that in 2022, an estimated $2.6 million worth of remittances is forecast to be sent by around 4 million users in South Africa.
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Chipper Cash has already attracted investment. In May 2019, the fintech firm raised a $2.4 million seed round led by San Francisco-based fintech investor Deciens Capital, which also led this most recent funding round.
In total Chipper Cash has raised $8.4 million — all of that funding coming in 2019, according to Crunchbase.
Other Chipper Cash investors include Silicon Valley accelerator 500 Startups and San Francisco investment firm Liquid 2 Ventures, which was co-founded by Joe Montana.
