Prince Boakye Boampong, the founder and CEO of Dash, has been temporarily suspended pending an investigation into financial impropriety.
According to a Techcrunch report, the board however stated that it placed the CEO on “indefinite administrative leave on January 24, 2023, pending a forensic financial audit of the company,” and that the audit results might be out within a month.
Founded by CEO Prince Boakye Boampong in 2019, Dash is a unified payment platform that seeks to connect financial wallets and bank accounts to facilitate transactions for consumers and businesses effortlessly. Boampong founded Dash after co-founding OMG Digital, a YC-backed Ghanaian media startup, in 2016.
Last year, the startup raised $32 million in a seed round led by New York-based private equity and venture capital fund Insight Partners. Valued then at slightly more than $200 million, it initially wanted to raise a quarter of that money, about $8 million. It did so by October 2021 off the back of acquiring about 200,000 users and processing $250 million in transaction volume.
Five months after raising the money, Boampong claimed that its total processing volume topped $1 billion and had acquired a million users from Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria. The rapid growth, coupled with the fintech boom of 2020–2021 that spilled into the first quarter of 2022, allowed Dash to draw new investors as it reopened and quadrupled its seed round.
Techcrunch reports that in retrospect, though, the user and transaction volume growth that Dash reported within that short period may not have been entirely above board, as its growth figures significantly differed from what it usually sees around how other consumer fintechs scale in Africa.
It also reported that “sources familiar with the company’s internal operations allege that executives repeatedly concealed financials within the firm and described a disorganized workplace where employees resigned and were laid off at will.”
It was also reported that Boampong sold millions of dollars’ worth of his shares in a secondary sale over the last two years.
In the interim, the Dash board has appointed Kenneth Kinyua, the former CEO of Kopo Kopo to be the interim CEO. Kenneth Kinyua recently joined Dash for a regional leadership role in East Africa. The board stated it is “confident in Mr. Kinyua’s leadership and ability to execute Dash’s mission to create a unified payments system designed to increase efficiency and accessibility for how Africans transact with digital money.”
Dash is currently operational in Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria, with plans to expand into South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda.
Boampong has not provided any formal response on the matter.