Wave Adds USD 137 M War Chest To Topple Africa's Cash Habit & Costly Rivals

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Senegal’s Wave Adds USD 137 M War Chest To Topple Africa’s Cash Habit & Costly Rivals

Across markets in Dakar, the Senegalese capital, vendors used to lose nearly a tenth of their daily earnings just by accepting mobile payments. Every transfer from a customer came with a fee (sometimes 5%, even 10%) sliced away by the telecom companies that dominated Senegal’s mobile money market for nearly a decade. Then, in 2018, something changed.

A new player, Wave, arrived with a simple pitch: What if sending money cost almost nothing? And Senegal’s mass market quickly embraced this new order.

That promise—radically cheaper digital payments—has turned Wave into one of Africa’s most valuable startups. Now, with a fresh USD 137 M debt round led by Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) and backed by global development financiers, the company is doubling down on its mission: to make Africa the first cashless continent.

Wave’s rise reads like a playbook for how to disrupt a monopoly. Before its launch, mobile money in West Africa was controlled by telecom operators like Orange, which charged fees as high as 10% per transaction. For millions of small merchants and low-income users, those fees made digital payments more expensive than cash.

Then came Wave—no fees on deposits or withdrawals, just a flat 1% on transfers, with bill payments subsidised by businesses rather than customers. The model was so aggressively consumer-friendly that skeptics questioned its sustainability. Yet six years later, Wave is thriving.

Today, the company operates in eight West African countries, serving 20 million monthly active users through a network of 150,000 mobile money agents. In 2021, it became Francophone Africa’s first unicorn after a record-breaking USD 200 M Series A. Now, with this new funding, it’s eyeing further expansion into Central and East Africa.

The USD 137 M debt round—led by RMB and supported by British International Investment (BII), Norfund, and Finnfund—comes at a pivotal moment. Africa’s startup ecosystem has seen venture funding dip, but debt financing is emerging as an alternative, especially for companies like Wave that have provable scale and revenue.

For development financiers, the appeal is clear as Wave is well-positioned as a financial inclusion machine. “Wave’s platform is a clear example of technology enabling inclusive finance at scale,” said a representative from British International Investment. “This is aligned with our mandate to support digital infrastructure that empowers communities.”

Wave CEO and co-founder Drew Durbin said in a statement that the new “funding means we can help even more people by delivering the best possible product at the lowest possible price.”

“It brings us closer to our mission of making Africa the first cashless continent.”

The numbers back him up. In Senegal alone, Wave now processes more transactions than some traditional banks. And for two years running, it’s been the only African company on Y Combinator’s list of top 50 highest-earning startups.

Wave’s ambitions, however, face real obstacles. Regulators are watching closely as fintechs gain influence, and in some countries, telecom operators still hold political sway. Then there’s the sheer dominance of cash—90% of transactions in Africa are still offline, per World Bank data.

But if anyone can shift that balance, it might be Wave. After all, it’s already done the unthinkable once: making digital money cheaper than cash and accessible to everyone, not just the rich as in the past, while wrestling market share from telecom giants. Now, with fresh capital and a continent still ripe for disruption, it’s betting it can do it again at scale.