Cameroonian Fintech Startup Ejara Raises $8M In Series A Funding Round
Ejara, a Cameroonian fintech, has announced a $8 million series A fundraising round led by Anthemis and Dragonfly. When combined with the $2 million raised in 2021, the total amount raised since inception is $10 million.
Other venture capital firms participating in this round include follow-on investors Mercy Corps Ventures, Coinshares Ventures, and Lateral Capital, as well as new investors Circle Ventures, Moonstake, Emurgo, Hashkey Group, and BPI France. Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockwoks, was also an angel investor in this round.
Why The Investors Invested
Since its inception, the firm has gained significant traction. Ejara now has over 70,000 users throughout nine Francophone African countries, with 100,000 expected by the end of the year.
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Interestingly, despite the global crypto meltdown, Ejara claims to have seen a 10x revenue growth and a 15% month-on-month transaction volume growth since last October.
Chatue-Diop attributes this growth to the company’s savings product, which she claims is the first of its kind in the crypto world.
A Look At What The Startup Does
Ejara, founded in 2019 by CEO Nelly Chatue-Diop and her co-founder Baptiste Andrieux, is a cryptocurrency investment software that allows users to acquire cryptocurrency and save it in decentralised wallets. Ejara’s goal is to “democratise access to investing and savings products throughout the region by utilising blockchain technology.”
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Furthermore, unlike most African crypto platforms, Ejara provides customers with the option of non-custodial wallets, allowing them to own and store their keys. This is why Ejara was unaffected by the factors that led to the demise of FTX and other crypto organizations.
According to Chatue-Diop, “When everyone was taking the other route and building centralized exchanges, we always thought that, if you want to own crypto, you need to own your keys. And that’s pretty much what’s saved us in turbulent times.”
Ejara’s crypto product has also taken off like wildfire because, in addition to connecting mobile money accounts and crypto access, users can also conduct cross-border transactions using stablecoins.
Ejara supports a number of non-profit initiatives to teach the public, particularly women, girls, and orphans, about crypto, savings, investments (it has yet to launch its fractional investing product), and financial education, all while preparing the market for growth.
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“The initiative we launched for women and orphans and girls is to improve their financial literacy and computer skills. When I think about Ejara, I think about an ecosystem and as a leveler to bring the community together, whether they are in Africa or the diaspora, whether they belong to the elites, or they are in the poorer layers of the community,” said the chief executive who also mentioned that Ejara recently obtained a license to extend its offerings to the French-speaking diaspora in Europe.
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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
