Ejara, a Cameroonian fintech, announced that it has raised $8 million in a series A funding round co-led by Anthemis and Dragonfly. Combined with $2 million raised in 2021, this brings total funds raised since inception to $10 million.
Founded in 2019 by CEO Nelly Chatue-Diop and her co-founder Baptiste Andrieux, Ejara offers an investment app that allows users buy crypto and save through decentralized wallets. Ejara wants to “democratize access to investment and savings products across the region, using blockchain technology.”
This round has other participating venture capital firms such as follow-on investors Mercy Corps Ventures, Coinshares Ventures and Lateral Capital–and new investors such as Circle Ventures, Moonstake, Emurgo, Hashkey Group and BPI France. An angel investor, Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockwoks, also participated in this round.
Ejara currently has over 70,000 users across nine Francophone African countries and expects to reach 100,000 by the end of the year.
Interestingly, Ejara claims to have witnessed a 10x revenue growth and a 15% month-on-month transaction volume growth since last October despite global crypto’s meltdown.
Chatue-Diop credits this growth to its savings product which she says it is the first of its kind in the crypto world.
Also while most crypto platforms in Africa provide custodial wallets to users, Ejara offers customers the option of non-custodial wallets so they could own and store their keys. This is why Ejara was not largely affected by factors that brought about the collapse of FTX and other crypto organizations
According to Chatue-Diop in a call with Techcrunch, “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 caught on like wild fire due to the fact that apart from connecting mobile money accounts and crypto access, users can also make cross-border transactions via stablecoins
To promote the nuances associated with crypto, savings and investments, Ejara champions a number of non-profit initiatives to teach the public, particularly women, girls and orphans about crypto, savings, investments (it is yet to launch its fractional investing product) and financial education while prepping the market for its growth.
“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.
