There has been rumours and even a Bloomberg report that Chipper Cash is thinking of selling the company.
Bloomberg reported recently that the Africa-focused fintech company that was backed by Silicon Valley Bank and cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is weighing options including exploring a sale or seeking new investors.
The report was published two days after the message from Chipper CEO, Ham Serunjogi that Chipper Cash has had overall insignificant exposure to the demise of both Silvergate Bank and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).
According to the Chipper CEO, “Given the scale and complexity of our global operations, Chipper Cash maintains multiple banking relationships across the world – including multiple within the United States. As such, we had a very limited amount of money (only about $1M) held in our SVB account at the time the bank was taken over by the California regulator. We have already received confirmation from the FDIC that we can expect about half the funds back by Monday March 13th 2023. Furthermore, there was absolutely no impact on our customer operations around the world.”
SVB Capital led the company’s $100m Series C raise in 2021 and there are feelers that the company might have been adversely affected by SVB’s demise.
The Bloomberg report stated that the company began considering the options even before SVB’s collapse last week. When asked about this, Chipper Cash reported that “It’s been fairly common practice for us to receive various M&A proposals from different parties, which we evaluate to varying degrees. That being said, we have never sought to be acquired.”
Chipper Cash was founded by Ham Serunjogi (Uganda) and Maijid Moujaled (Ghana) in October 2018 and currently has offices in Ghana and Nigeria. It offers no-fee, P2P, cross-border mobile-money payments in Africa. It is currently present in seven African countries – Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa, Kenya – and one non-African country, United Kingdom.
Having raised over $305 million to date, it was valued at $2 billion when it raised $150 million in a Series C extension round led by cryptocurrency exchange FTX in November 2021. The subsequent implosion of FTX led to a massive devaluation of Chipper Cash stock, which currently languishes at about $1.25 billion.
In February 2023, Chipper Cash laid off another 12.5% of its workforce just ten weeks after laying off the previous 12.5%. (affecting its engineering team the most).
