African cross-border payments company, Chipper Cash, has closed $150 million in a Series C funding round.
The funding round was piloted by FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange platform owned by Sam Bankman-Fried.
SVB Capital, the corporate venture arm of SVB Financial Group, reinvested in the extension round as well as other existing investors like Bezos Expeditions, Deciens Capital, Tribe Capital, Ribbit Capital, and One Way Ventures.
New, undisclosed investors also participated in the funding round.
This investment is coming just six months after Chipper Cash closed $100 million in its first Series C round, led by the corporate venture arm of SVB Financial Group, SVB Capital.
The latest investment brings Chipper Cash’s total Series C funding to $250 million, while it’s total funding to date is more than $305 million.
No doubt, Chipper Cash is indeed a unicorn now with the extension round taking its valuation a little over $2 billion.
Chipper Cash was founded in 2018 by Ham Serunjogi and Maijid Moujaled to provide a free p2p cross-border payment service in Africa through its app.
Its services are available in seven African countries — Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa.
Speaking on the company’s unique services, Serunjogi, CEO, Chipper Cash, said, “Chipper Cash is offering remittances considerably cheaper than anyone else,”
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.”
Chipper Cash currently allows peer-to-peer money flow from the U.S. to Nigeria and Uganda, and it plans to roll out its services to users in South Africa, Ghana and Kenya before the end of the year.
In May this year, it expanded to the U.K, enabling people to send funds from the European nation to African markets.
It also has plans to enable sending funds to the U.S. from Africa, with Uganda, South Africa and Kenya being the first to get access next year.
Earlier in the year, the company was selected by Twitter at the launch of Twitter’s Tip Jar feature to enable African creators receive payment on its platform.
Chipper Cash plans to make its Tip Jar integration accessible for users in the U.S. by next year, an obvious growth opportunity for it coupled with the funding from FTX (one of the largest cryptocurrency derivatives exchanges in the world).
FTX’s investment in Chipper Cash is its first in Africa, and according to its CEO, Bankman-Fried, FTX’s partnership with Chipper Cash is to “make money transfer as simple as a text message and accelerate the adoption of crypto within Africa and beyond.”
Chipper Cash’s network APIs, which basically enable developers to use its infrastructure to send and receive payments into Chipper wallets, is another example of the benefit of the partnership between Chipper Cash and FTX. This means that the option to “Pay with Chipper Cash” will be available for Africans who use the FTX platform.
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