African Fintech Chipper raises $100 million in Series C Round
African fintech, Chipper Cash, has raised $100 million in Series C round which should give the company as well as the payments industry as a whole, a big boost in the African region.
Chipper Cash was founded in 2018 and it has a mobile app that gives free peer-to-peer fees payment services in many African countries including Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, and others.
It is also the company that managed to get investments from Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions VC Fund last year in its previous fundraise and this has boosted the profile of the company manifold.
Using the new round of investments, the company hopes to make upgrades for its product range and also make further inroads into the various countries. The new upgrades include the ability to buy US stocks from Africa and also investments into Bitcoin. These 2 upgrades, if and when available, would boost their usage even further.
The company has over 3 million users and handles around 80,000 transactions daily. It processes payments worth more than $100 million a month and this shows the potential of the African region as far as the payments industry is concerned. These are countries where around 80% of the people have mobiles and so the market for such payment services is huge.
The company also runs Chipper Checkout which is focused on merchants and is a system that is based on fees. This division helps to supplement the free payment division that it runs for the consumers. The company plans to expand its services into other countries in the region and also penetrate more into specific countries with its services.
The payments industry is expected to grow manifold over the next few months as the pandemic slowly and steadily recedes. The pandemic has made many people discover the ease of mobile and online payments and hence they are likely to continue using such payment services despite the ability to go outside once the pandemic is gone. This new habit is likely to benefit the payment providers in the long run.
The African continent had been an untapped market for so very long and it is only now that it is beginning to realize its potential and there is still a long way to go in terms of technological advancement and innovation. Companies like Chipper would hope to take a large slice of the pie as and when it becomes available in the coming months.
