Africa-Focused Payment Startup Chipper Cash Raises USD 6 Mn Seed Round

Chipper Cash, the San-Francisco-headquartered fintech startup facilitating cross-border payments on the African continent, has closed a USD 6 Mn seed round.

Deciens Capital led the latest funding round with participation from previous investors and a few other new backers.

Chipper Cash which is already offering zero-fee, mobile-based, peer-to-payment services in 6 African countries, will be looking to grow its team and expand into new markets, particularly in Southern Africa, with the fresh capital. That’s what TechCrunch gathered from the startup’s co-founder and CEO, Ham Serungoji.

According to Serungoji, Chipper Cash, which was co-founded by Ghanaian Majid Moujaled, now has more than 600,000 active users and has processed over 3 million transactions on its no-fee, P2P, cross-border mobile-money payments product.

Those are impressive numbers for a startup that only launched in 2018, and this may have encouraged Deciens Capital to follow up on its previous investment. In what has been a rather busy 2019, Chipper Cash also raised USD 2.4 Mn in May this year in a round also led by Deciens Capital.

That was before it launched in arguably Africa’s largest fintech hub, Nigeria, in September. Overall, the startup has raised over USD 8 Mn in seed capital.

Dan Kimerling, the co-founder of Deciens Capital, confirmed the VC’s lead on the latest round while revealing that he will continue his role on Chipper Cash’s board.

Besides the P2P offering, Chipper Cash also runs Chipper Checkout: a merchant-focused, fee-based C2B mobile payment product. It is this C2B product that actually enables Chipper Cash to run its free P2P mobile-money business since it brings in the bulk of the revenue.

By going after the market in Southern Africa, Chipper Cash would have its eyes on the continent’s second-largest and most advanced economy, South Africa. If the startup does make a successful play for South Africa, it would have placed itself in all three key fintech markets in Africa.

Currently, Chipper Cash offers its services in Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Kenya.