[Transcript] #33: Chipper Cash - How the FinTech platform started from African remittances to become the fastest unicorn in Africa Tech history
Recorded July 2021
Hello, Bankole here.
Chipper Cash was hard to ignore. In July 2021 when we recorded this episode, Chipper Cash was valued at $2.2B and Africa’s most valuable startup. They had a compelling pitch: African cross-border trade was an untapped opportunity, and they knew exactly how to capture it. Bezos Expeditions, Joe Montana, SVB (RIP), FTX (RIP?) backed up the money truck. That feels like a lifetime ago.
What’s happened since has been the opposite of smooth sailing. Like many tech startups, Chipper Cash went through multiple rounds of layoffs. They tried to sell to Zepz, but ultimately the deal didn’t happen. In 2023, it was reported that Chipper Cash had only 10 months of cash left in the bank, hard to imagine for a company that raised $300M.
Chipper cash has since announced a pivot to AI, and a focus on profitability. I love to see these companies become successful, as it attracts even more capital and talent to Africa tech. I’m rooting for Chipper Cash to get out of this rough patch and deliver value to their users.
It was a fun episode to record and listen to. Everyone can listen to the podcast here. Paid subscribers can access the transcript below.
Have a great weekend,
Bankole
[00:00:00] Olumide Ogunsanwo: Welcome to Afrobility, a conversation about African business and technology. Today we're going to talk about Chipper Cash, the African fintech payment and remittances player. We'll explore the Chipper Cash story across six different areas. One, intra African remittances context. Two, global remittances context. Three, Chipper Cash's launch, early history, growth, and fundraising. 4. Chipper Cash's product and monetization strategy. 5. Its competitive positioning and potential exit options. And then 6. We'll end with our views on its overall outlook. This episode was recorded on July 11th and August 1st, 2021.
[00:01:14] Olumide Ogunsanwo: Chipper Cash! It's a fintech company that offers a bunch of consumer merchant services. Let's do it one at a time. So consumer services, it includes intra African remittances, so within African countries, international remittances, so other countries to Africa, e. g. U. S. to Africa, U. K. to Africa. It also does stock trading.
Crypto investing and then a bunch of other features such as buying airtime and paying bills. So a lot of stuff on the consumer side. It also has merchant services businesses, which includes business payment services and then a network API. So it's quite broad and quite massive in the variety
[00:01:48] Bankole Makanju: of stuff it does.
[00:01:48] Bankole Makanju: They've also raised a lot of money as you do, as you do in Africa FinTech.
[00:01:54] Bankole Makanju: Yeah. So my Nigeria bias is, is that like, I obviously, when they launched, I wasn't thinking a lot about Chipper Cash because they started off in East Africa. And then it was the Bezos investment that made you go okay, like business expeditions, investments, family office investment.
[00:02:09] Bankole Makanju: I thought that was very, very interesting. Very first investments in Africa tech.