Dash, a Ghana-based unified payments software, has secured $32.8 million in a seed round that was oversubscribed.
“I was blown away by the ubiquity and convenience of mobile money in 2014 when I visited Kenya for the first time. However, there are over 200 mobile money wallets and 100 banks across the continent that [do] not work with each other,” founder and CEO Prince Boakye Boampong. “We’re building this interoperability so a Kenyan traveling to Ghana or Ghanaian travelling to Kenya would be able to pay for stuff without having to change currencies or setting up accounts when they touch ground. We’re taking a page from AliPay and PayTm by building features that will make the lives of our users easier without having to switch from different providers.”
Dash’s seed round, headed by New York-based Insight Venture Partners, is the second largest of its kind in Africa, trailing only PalmPay’s $40 million. The round follows a $500,000 pre-seed investment and adds to a growing list of fintech agreements amid a surge of innovation sweeping through the industry, which accounted for up to 60% of Africa’s total venture capital investments last year.
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Global Founders Capital and 4DX Ventures also participated in the round. They were joined by ASK Capital, Techstars, Guillaume Pousaz’s Zinal Growth Partners, Jitendra Gupta of Jupiter Money, Amrish Rau of Pine Labs, the Moss founders, ProcessOut executives, and the PennyLane founders.
The money will enable the Techstars-backed startup to enter new regions, like Tanzania and South Africa, obtain necessary licenses, increase its team, invest in technology, and develop new services.
Why The Investors Invested
The speed with which Dash was able to treble its initial investment in just five months had investors rushing after the three-year-old startup. In January, Dash claimed to have processed over $300 million in TPV, up 300 percent monthly from Q4 2021.
Since its start in 2020, it has processed over $1 billion from a million consumers it has attracted in Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria, according to Boampong.
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These figures show how much Dash has grown since last October, when it first closed its seed round before reopening due to increased investor interest. At the time, the Ghanaian fintech was seeking $8 million–a sizable seed–and had only a little more than 200,000 members, with $250 million in transactions.
Boampong believes the large $32 million seed round is not harmful for the young startup at all.
“For most products, it’s either you are figuring stuff out, or you figured it out. We were kind of caught off guard with the crazy growth in a very weird way. We didn’t prepare for the growth, so when it happened, we raised more money to meet that demand and we believe it can only get better,” he added, citing a 5x increase in user base and transaction volume as a reason for the company’s massive seed fundraising.
This transaction is particularly notable because it shifts emphasis away from Nigeria, Africa’s hottest fintech industry, to Ghana, where entrepreneurs raised only $167 million in venture capital last year.
A Look At What Dash Does
Prince Boakye Boampong, the company’s founder and CEO, founded the startup in 2019. Before joining Dash, Boampong co-founded OMG Digital, a YC-backed Ghanaian media business he co-founded in 2016 with Jesse Ghansah, the current CEO of Float.
Boampong had visited Kenya two years before and was captivated by how unbanked Kenyans sent and received money while paying bills with mobile money, a payment method pioneered by Safaricom’s M-Pesa, which has around 30 million members. However, as a Ghanaian with a background in mobile money, Boampong has seen how interoperability can be an issue both within and outside of mobile money systems.
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Dash’s alternative payment network connects mobile money and traditional banks, allowing individuals and companies to conduct transactions more easily. It is not intended to take the role of mobile money or banks. Instead, its wallet gives consumers access to a variety of services that aren’t available through their usual supplier.
Dash’s strategy is similar to that of Visa or Mastercard in that it routes payments through banks and telcos regardless of who issued the card. As a result, users from various countries — for the time being, Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya — can connect their bank or mobile money accounts to Dash, pay bills, and send and receive money from other users, while the platform handles currency changes.
Processing fees, interest received when users save, FX costs when Dash is used cross-border, bill payments (commission earned when users pay bills on Dash), and subscription (for Dash+, the company’s premium service) are all sources of revenue for the company.
Dash Payments Dash Payments
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer