Unicorn Or Not, What Exactly Is Chipper Cash Trying To Be?

When Ham Serunjogi and Maijid Moujaled finally opted to bite the bullet and launch their own company in 2018, they had come through years of school and stints at Yahoo!, Facebook, and Flickr between them.

But the pair weren’t about to unveil another “cool stuff”, there are way too many of those anyway. Ugandan Serunjogi and Ghanaian Moujaled had their hearts set on something pragmatic, simple, practical, and far more relevant to their roots.

“Let’s do to money what WhatsApp did to texting” - that’s a succinct way of describing the zero-fee cross-border money transfer solution that the duo set out to build when they launched Chipper Cash.

Now, 3 years and USD 152.2 Mn in funding later, the excitement around Chipper Cash is probably at an all-time high (especially since the recent USD 100 Mn Series C which means the company has raised USD 143.8 Mn within a year from high-profile investors, including Jeff Bezos).

However, all the fanfare and the ensuing conversations about whether or not Chipper Cash is Africa’s latest tech unicorn, have sort of overshadowed a rather unconventional development around Chipper Cash that actually seems far more interesting.