Cameroon’s Ejara raises $2M to offer crypto and investment services in Francophone Africa –
Summary
While founder and CEO Chatue-Diop studied and later held a couple of high executive roles in Europe in the space of 10 years, she had a nudge to come back to Francophone Africa to start a company. Ejara has more than 8,000 users from Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea and Senegal, as well as French-speaking Africans in the diaspora (Europe, Asia and the U.S.), and caters to them via a partnership with crypto payment infrastructure company MoonPay so they can remit money to friends and family in Africa. Then we have a tiny portion of the customer base that are wholesalers and do a lot of volumes; they use crypto to finance and buy their goods from overseas suppliers via this method.” The seed investment will see Ejara focus extensively on growth, deployment of features in the company’s roadmap and expanding the product and tech team. Despite Francophone Africa accounting for about 25% of the continent’s population, she says startups in the region have attracted less than 1% of the venture capital — but holds that Ejara’s funding round offers a glimmer of hope, especially in a largely untapped space as fintech. “We are excited to work with Nelly and the Ejara team to deliver financial services via non-custodial wallets and offers a new level of trust and transparency to Francophone savers and investors,” Demirors said.