- Chipper Cash offers a no-fee peer-to-peer cross-border payment service in Africa via its app. Founded in 2018 by Ham Serunjogi and Maijid Moujaled, the company’s services are used across seven African countries: Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa, and Kenya.
Chipper Cash, an African cross-border payments company startup valued at slightly over $2 billion, has reportedly laid off many employees.
This comes about one year after the company announced that it had raised $150 million in a Series C round led by Sam Bankman-Fried’s now-collapsed cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX, and a few weeks after announcing its acquisition of Zambian fintech company Zoona.
This news was confirmed by the company’s VP of Engineering, Erin Fusaro, in a post on LinkedIn. Fusaro stated that while she was not affected by the layoffs, many of her close colleagues and friends were.
She also offered to connect people looking for talent in engineering, technical program management, and IT and encouraged those who were let go to reach out to her for help finding new jobs.
Yesterday, a few affected and non-affected employees took to LinkedIn to reveal the news. Reportedly more than 50 employees were affected across multiple departments; the engineering team took the biggest hit, with around 60% of those laid off coming from the department, according to people familiar with the matter.
Last November, the African cross-border payments company raised $150 million in a Series C extension round led by Sam Bankman-Fried’s now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX. The investment came barely six months after Chipper Cash closed its first Series C round of $100 million, led by SVB Capital, the corporate venture capital arm of SVB Financial Group. Since its inception, Chipper Cash has raised more than $305 million from investors, including Deciens Capital, Ribbit Capital and Bezos Expeditions.
