Y Combinator neobank Djamo raises $17M with 1M users across Francophone Africa
Summary
It now serves over 1 million customers across both countries.The Y Combinator-backed fintech just raised $17 million to expand its product suite for these retail customers and the thousands of small businesses it has onboarded in the last two years.The equity round, the largest ever for an Ivorian startup, surpasses Djamos $14 million Series A in 2022 and reflects continued investor confidence in its mission to make banking accessible and affordable.Co-founder and CEO Hassan Bourgi declined to share the new valuation but said it has doubled since the last raise.Bourgi founded Djamo with chief product and technical officer R\xe9gis Bamba in 2020 to close the financial access gap in French-speaking African countries, where few adults have bank accounts. The startup offers the accessibility of mobile money with the financial depth of a bank account, a similar playbook that SoftBank-backed Opay and Transsion-owned PalmPay have used to scale to tens of millions of customers in Nigeria.Its target is a growing segment of users, mostly younger customers, whove outgrown mobile money wallets but still find traditional banks expensive, outdated, or inaccessible, the founders say.These users are evolving, said Bourgi. And this is what we are building, trying to become the go-to bank for this huge cohort of customers that is evolving now to more complex, wealth-building financing opportunities.Since our last coverage, Djamo has expanded beyond cards and peer-to-peer transfers. The Ivorian fintech now offers savings vaults, investment products thanks to the regions first fintech-issued brokerage license and salary-linked bank accounts, which Bourgi sees as important to boosting customer engagement.Like many neobanks, Djamo attracts banked users who treat it as a secondary account for smoother bill payments and mobile money integration. With women making up a third of its users, Djamo is not only closing the gender gap but unlocking economic opportunity at scale.Other investors participating in the round include SANAD Fund for MSMEs (micro, small, and medium enterprises), managed by Finance in Motion; Partech; Oikocredit; Enza Capital; and Y Combinator.