Ham Serunjogi and Maijid Moujaled believed there was a fortune to be made bringing transnational financial services to Africa's 1.2 billion people. Sending money between countries was extremely difficult and banking systems were very underdeveloped. The two met at Grinnell College in Iowa and came up with the idea for a money transfer app there, but wanted to acquire experience working in the tech industry first.

In the spring of 2018, Serunjogi texted Moujaled, who was working as a software engineer in San Francisco, to say it was time to get going. Serunjogi quit his own job and moved into Moujaled’s studio apartment, sleeping on an air mattress in the kitchenette. The two used their combined savings of less than $30,000 and Moujaled’s ongoing salary as seed capital. They launched a test version of their app in July 2018, letting customers send money from Uganda to Ghana for free. The cofounders took pitches to more than 50 VC firms until, in November 2018, 500 Startups agreed to invest $150,000.

By mid-2019 Chipper Cash was available in Uganda, Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda. It soon expanded to Nigeria, Africa’s biggest market with more than 200 million people, and by the end of the year, it had 600,000 customers. It also introduced a foreign-exchange markup fee of 2% to 5% to start generating revenue. As bitcoin rose from $14,000 to $20,000 in the fall of 2020, Chipper began to let users buy and sell bitcoin and ether, establishing a second lucrative line of business: trading fees. It reached a $2.2 billion valuation in late 2021, with investment from firms including Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, Ribbit Capital and Bezos Expeditions. Transactions grew from $200 million in the first quarter of 2021 to $1.6 billion 12 months later.

Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/j....effkauflin/2022/06/0

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