TechCrunch+

Last February, Djamo announced that it got accepted into Y Combinator, the first from Ivory Coast. Months later, the two-year-old fintech has raised $14 million in funding from the famed accelerator, as well as from three lead investors — Enza Capital, Oikocredit and Partech Africa — and other participating investors, including Janngo Capital, P1 Ventures, Axian and Launch Africa.

As with most fintechs across Africa, Djamo, launched by Régis Bambaand Hassan Bourgi last year, provides financial services for the underbanked and unbanked population. Its focus is on French-speaking markets where fewer than 25% of adults have bank accounts. One reason why this is so is that banks concentrate on affluent customers and those they deem profitable for business. But as banks slacked, mobile money from the region’s telcos filled in the gap, and in the last 10 years, their wallets have reached more than 60% of the population — proof of how many millions of French-speaking natives were hungry for financial services.

Today, this mobile money infrastructure and reach allows startups like Djamo to build upon their existing payment infrastructure to democratize financial access across banking and mobile money spheres. Djamo’s app allows for interoperability between banks and mobile money, meaning that its customers in Ivory Coast can send money from their bank accounts to mobile money wallets, and back; it has leveraged this characteristic to build a full suite of financial services.

Djamo’s first product is a Visa-powered debit card that lets users make online purchases on sites such as Amazon, Alibaba, or Netflix. Other products include virtual accounts for peer-to-peer transactions, a product to receive salaries, and an autosaving product that offers guidance into customers’ financial goals. Kuda, Telda, PiggyVest, TymeBank and Koa are a few examples of comparable products across Africa.

“Before Djamo, it was a real challenge for an average customer to receive salaries digitally because they weren’t integrated into the banking system,” CEO Bourgi told TechCrunch over a call. “We found the right partner to launch that product and any company can pay salary to employees with a Djamo account. When you look at Djamo, alongside other products, we want customers to be able to better manage their money and help them plan for their future. We’re not necessarily to digitize cash like mobile wallets. We are here to work on the personal finance side.”

Customers see so much value in the different use cases Djamo has assembled so far that the fintech still relies on word of mouth to scale across Ivory Coast, according to Bamba, the company’s chief product officer. The platform currently has registered over 500,000 customers, a more than 5x increase from the 90,000 customers Djamo had onboarded as of February 2021.

“In our region, users pay amongst the highest fees in the world but do not always receive adequate service in return and that can be extremely frustrating. The one thing that we want to achieve is to offer a product where customers get real value for their money,” said the CPO. “The app has been growing organically like crazy and to get such numbers in a market like this within a short period, is proof that we’re nailing the overall user experience and building something very relevant for users.”

While they didn’t provide an update to the 50,000 monthly transactions recorded during the February interview, the founders say the fintech platform has processed over $400 million since inception. Djamo is also experiencing a revenue growth of 20% to 25% month-on-month, spurred by an amendment to its pricing plan that includes a free option and two premium options with varying services: $2/month and $3.5/month. They say these options are 80% cheaper than other bank accounts offered by financial institutions — including microfinance banks that Djamo views as direct competition due to their adoption of digital channels to provide financial services — in Ivory Coast.

Bourgi said 60% of Djamo customers have never used a Visa debit card before joining the platform. It’s a feat the chief executive is proud of and deems crucial in Djamo’s bid to make financial services accessible to the masses, including those outside the Ivory Coast. The $14 million in funding capital, which it claims to be the largest-ever equity round for a startup in Ivory Coast, will help the startup advance into two other countries across Francophone Africa before the end of next year and expand product offerings to include investments and lending.

Tidjane Deme, the general partner at Partech Africa, speaking on the investment, said, “Francophone Africa offers a large integrated market, with [a] fast-growing demand for frictionless services from a new cohort of digital-native young adults. We are excited to join forces with high-caliber local investors who bring sector and regional expertise to enable Djamo to unlock this opportunity.”

Consumer finance app Djamo eyes Francophone Africa expansion, backed by new $14M round by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch

When Female Invest launched in 2019, it did so with the goal of creating a community where women who wanted to invest in the stock market, but weren’t sure where to start, could gain the knowledge and confidence to take the plunge. Now, its users will be able to do so all within the Female Invest platform.

The Copenhagen-based startup announced the acquisition of fellow Danish fintech Gaia Investments this week with plans to integrate the trading platform, which focuses on investing in companies with sustainability goals, into its app. The purchase price of Gaia was undisclosed, but the startup raised at a $3 million valuation, three months prior to the transaction, Female Invest told TechCrunch.

For Female Invest co-founder and partner Camilla Falkenberg, adding the ability to invest directly through Female Invest is a great next step for the subscription edtech platform.

“Since day one, we have always been very focused on building the features and products that were requested by our community,” Falkenberg said. “And we get requests every day for the possibility to trade directly through us.”

She added that she thinks the platform gets that request so often because its users trust it. A recent survey of customers found that 96% of them would trust Female Invest with their money more than their bank.

Female Invest has spent the last year building up the company in a way to more easily integrate trading, too. Falkenberg said since they raised their $4.5 million seed round last November, they’ve built out an app, expanded their tech team and raised an additional $3 million in funding.

But when they came across Gaia Investments in July, they realized it might make more sense, and save time, for Female Invest to partner with an existing trading platform as opposed to building their own.

“Gaia has a strong brand here in the Nordics and such a strong focus on ethics and sustainable investing, something we are also very interested in,” she said. “As the talks progressed, it became more and more clear it was a great move for us.”

The team at Gaia felt the same way, Mads Sverre Willumsen, a co-founder and CTO told TechCrunch.

“We knew Female Invest and saw the journey they had been on in the past three years,” he said. “After we talked and saw we had alignment, the decision was not that difficult.”

The two companies also shared similar founding stories — both looked to create an investing product that they felt was needed and didn’t exist.

For Female Invest, it was in 2019 when the founders realized there wasn’t a good resource that taught women how to start investing. For Gaia, it was when co-founder and CEO David Bentzon-Ehlers’s mother asked him in 2020 if there was a safe place to invest in sustainable companies, and his realization that the platform she was looking for didn’t yet exist.

While it isn’t super common for startups to get acquired so early in life — Gaia had just completed a TechStars accelerator program a few months earlier — Sverre Willumsen said the transaction made sense for Gaia because they were more interested in expanding the reach of their product than being startup founders.

“I didn’t become a founder in the first place to be a founder,” he said. “I did it because it was an opportunity to make a lot of innovation and a difference for people quite quickly.”

The current Gaia users will be offloaded — with their money returned in full — in the near future as the platform starts to integrate into Female Invest. Falkenberg said from there they don’t have a specific launch date yet for Female Invest users, but that the ability to trade will launch first in the European Union and in the U.K. after that.

Consolidation of early-stage startups has been a rising trend this year, and as the fintech sector has struggled in 2022’s uncertainty, it seems wise that some of these smaller companies will combine to avoid getting left behind. I’m sure we will start to see more of this heading into next year.

For Female Invest though, the long-term plan, regardless of market conditions, is all falling into place.

“Our vision is to create an extremely user-friendly, and easy to navigate, platform with a focus on sustainability to invest in the values that matter to them,” Falkenberg said. “We have a very loyal user base who is just waiting for us to launch the next product which is a great starting point.”

Female Invest acquires sustainability-focused investment platform Gaia Investments by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch