Jambo, a Congo-based startup that is democratizing access to crypto-based income-generation opportunities through “learn, play, earn,” has received $30 million in Series A funding led by Paradigm, a firm known for backing disruptive crypto and Web3 firms and protocols.
ParaFi Capital, Pantera Capital, Delphi Ventures, Kingsway Capital, Gemini Frontier Fund, BH Digital, Graticule Asset Management Asia, Shima Capital, Morningstar Ventures, and others also participated in the round.
The new backers join previous seed round investors, which include Coinbase Ventures, Tiger Global, and Alameda Research.
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“Growing up in the Democratic Republic of Congo, my sister and co-founder Alice and I witnessed first hand the continent’s potential for economic innovation and prosperity. Coming from a family committed to investing in Africa’s success for over three generations, we are dedicated to helping more Africans achieve financial well-being,’’ James Zhang, CEO and Co-Founder, Jambo said in a statement.
The financing will let Jambo quadruple its personnel in Africa by the end of the year, allowing it to further educate the continent on Web3 technology. The financing will also allow the startup to expand into 15+ more cities by the end of the year, aiming to reach over 200K active community members, students, and ambassadors. The business will also be able to engage engineers to build a Web3 super app that would allow Africans to trade crypto, buy and sell NFTs, play crypto games, and access top worldwide web3 apps.
Why The Investors Invested
Jambo said it has recorded considerable traction since its last funding.
“One city at a time, we’re building local grassroots networks of ambassadors that cater our educational programs to each community, and we’ve reached some exciting milestones over the last couple of months, including: Opening Jambo offices across the continent for our on-the-ground operations; Partnering with thousands of internet cafes and college booths to provide Web3 students access to computers and high speed internet; Garnering interest from thousands of people in Africa to test and use the Jambo Web3 super app that we’re building,” Zhang, said.
“As Paradigm’s first investment in Africa, we couldn’t be more excited to partner with the Jambo team in this next phase of growth. We see massive Web3 potential in Africa and it’s clear that James and Alice are uniquely positioned to build a durable on-ramp for the continent,” Casey Caruso, Investment Partner at Paradigm
A Look At What The Startup Does
Jambo intends to onboard millions of users to web3 across Africa through its applications, according to James Zhang, the company’s co-founder and CEO. He and his sister, both Congo-born Chinese, started the company in November 2021 after seeing a chance to replicate the success of web3 projects in Southeast Asia across Africa.
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Jambo intends to be the continent’s largest and most influential Web3 user acquisition site, acting as a link between Africa and apps from around the world looking to enter the African market.
When users use the Jambo platform, they can save money on data. According to Zhang, Jambo works with telecom carriers to obtain a nearly 70% discount, which it then sells straight to its subscribers at a 50% discount. “It’s one of our primary user acquisition techniques,” Zhang explained, “where we aim to quadruple every African’s airtime and data.”
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Users can also earn tokens (which can be converted to money) by watching social media content on the startup’s app.
“The reason we can do that is via partnerships with these companies as we tokenize a part of their advertising budget and directly provide to the end-user,” he said. “Many web2 incumbents or even web3 are having a $100–200 user acquisition costs so we can lower that by order of magnitude by directly incentivizing the end-user.”
Play-to-earn games are also coming to Jambo. There are currently no well-known play-to-earn web3 games from Africa, owing to a lack of infrastructure for creating such through Guilds. Jambo, according to Zhang, wants to construct such infrastructure. Despite this, unlike well-known guilds that collect a percentage of profits from its members, his company has no plans to take a cut from its members’ earnings. Jambo’s revenue would instead come from web2 models, which would charge advertising money as well as fees from selling airtime and data.
“We started Jambo last year with the mission to onboard the next million (and potentially billion) African people to Web3. As blockchain and fintech enthusiasts ourselves, we’re bullish on Web3’s potential to bring prosperity to every corner of Africa, where we are seeing the youthful, educated and smartphone-savvy population already embracing crypto at a rapid clip — Africa’s crypto market grew 1200% in value in the past year alone. Equipping the continent with the correct tools to better harness this disruptive technology, however, is no simple task,’’ Zhang, said.
Jambo intends to spearhead true Web3 revolution in Africa, with plans to launch the AfricaDAO investment fund to empower and invest in businesses who share its vision and goal to positively touch the lives of millions of people across Africa for decades to come.
Jambo crypto web3 Jambo crypto web3
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexperts.com/view_expert/charles-rapulu-udoh