FTX invests in Chipper Cash through $150 million Series C funding round
FTX, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world and which is now seeking to expand into other areas of financial services, has again invested in a Series C funding round of Chipper Cash, which is an African cross-border payments company.
This round of Series C funding helped to raise $150 million and was led by FTX while the previous Series C funding round was led by SVB Capital and helped to raise $100 million and so far, the company has managed to raise $305 million making its valuation cross $2 billion. The company was started in 2018 by current CEO Ham Serunjogi along with his co-founder Maijid Moujaled and it offered a no-fee peer-to-peer cross border payments service for Africa and it currently has its services including South Africa and Kenya. Recently it began to expand its services outside Africa as well as it opened up in the UK so that users in the UK would be able to send payments and funds to countries in Africa where Chipper already had a presence.
“Chipper Cash is offering remittances considerably cheaper than anyone else,” Serunjogi said. “More important to that is that we are now the first ones that I know honestly to be able to support Africa to the U.S. in terms of sending money.”
The company also expanded into the US as well where the market for the US to Africa payments is already very crowded but the company hopes that its low-cost service would be able to make the difference. The margins in the remittance industry are generally quite low but the volumes are huge and this has only increased manifold in recent years with the advent of digital payments and so each cent matters and that is one of the reasons for the increased competition in this lucrative industry.
The company is also looking to enter into other parts of the payments industry with it working on a service to allow payments from Africa to the US as well which it expects to launch in a few countries by next year. It is also working on social payments which are expected to become a booming industry in the coming years as it seeks to reward content providers with direct payments from those who consume content, something that can be done through Twitter. The investment from FTX could also open up the possibility of FTX pushing through its exchange and other services into Africa through Chipper.
