Ejara raises $2 million to provide crypto and investing services in Francophone Africa

Cryptocurrency use in Africa varies greatly depending on where you are. While nations with currently unstable currencies, such as Nigeria’s naira, see massive usage, other regions that use the CFA franc see only sporadic usage.

There are over 200 million Francophones in the CFA franc-using region. Cryptocurrency users will find that Africa is a welcoming place to do business. A small number of firms, however, have begun to capitalise on this promising new market for mobile money and investment apps in the continent. This is why Nelly Chatue-Diop, the founder of Ejara, has raised $2 million to pioneer the use of cryptocurrency and investing services in the area.

Co-lead investors were CoinShare Venture Capital and the Anthemis Group. There are four other funds involved: Mercy Corps Ventures, Lateral Capital, LoftyInc Capital, and the NetX Fund, among others. As well as Ledger and Blockworks, a syndicate social fund invested alongside two angel investors, Pascal Gauthier and Jason Yanowitz.

Founder and CEO Chatue-Diop spent ten years in Europe studying and working in high positions before returning to Francophone Africa to create a company. Past events combined with current opportunities culminated in that slight prod.  When France devalued the CFA franc in 1994, Chatue-family Diop’s in Douala, Cameroon, had a life-altering experience. This, she claims, has put her family (as well as millions of others) in financial peril.

As a child, She grew up in the middle class, and her family was not wealthy.  The government was unable to pay salaries because of the sudden disappearance of all of their savings. As a result, even at that young age, She began to wonder how the family had managed to do everything correctly while still ending up in that situation. 

Blockchain was a new concept to her in 2015, and she thought it would be ideal for solving the challenges she had to deal with as a child. According to her,  blockchain technology helped her to understand that people can recover complete control over their assets and income and they can protect and increase their wealth.  She, therefore, joined forces with Baptiste Andrieux, a long-time friend and successful serial entrepreneur, to launch Ejara in Cameroon and the greater Francophone market.

A small group of wealthy individuals in Francophone Africa use cryptocurrencies to protect their assets from inflation by storing them in a digital ledger. Using crowd-funding, Ejara hopes to make investing in the French-speaking African market more accessible to the typical investor.

Due to its inherent transparency and security, a blockchain-based mobile investing platform was deemed essential by the CEO to furthering the continent’s financial inclusion. Although crypto companies were springing up everywhere, She saw that only a few spoke to Francophone Africans.  She believed that launching a cryptocurrency was the best idea because of what it implies in terms of having complete control over one’s financial resources. When people talk about cryptocurrencies in general, a common topic that comes up is the use of wallets for private key storage..

Third-party companies maintain private keys for custodial wallets, but non-custodial wallets allow users to keep and store their own keys. In spite of the focus on control in the crypto investment and retail conversation, most African crypto platforms’ prepaid cards don’t give customers nearly as much power as they might think.  For this reason, the company claimed it is giving its users non-custodial wallets so they can purchase, sell, exchange, and store their crypto investments in a secure manner.

However, the company intends to broaden its offering by supplying other assets, such as fractional shares, stocks, and commodities as well as financial instruments.  Over 8,000 customers from Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali, Guinea and Senegal as well as French-speaking Africans in the Diaspora (Europe, Asia and the U.S.) use Ejara to send money to friends and family in Africa through a relationship with crypto payment infrastructure business MoonPay. Everything was done with no marketing expenditure, according to the CEO.

When it comes to users, Chatue-Diop divides them into two categories: those who buy crypto to save for the future and those who use it for frequent business transactions. 

Because retirement funds are uncommon in Africa, some clients choose Ejara as a substitute. People use the platform to save for their children’s college education, especially mothers. Also, a small percentage of the company’s customers are wholesalers who handle large volumes of business, and they utilise crypto to finance and purchase their goods from international suppliers using this approach.

Ejara plans to use the seed funding to accelerate growth, deploy corporate roadmap items, and increase the product and tech team.  In a recent interview, Meltem Demirors of CoinShares discussed the opportunities in Francophone Africa and the lack of finance in the region. Because of this, she claims, businesses in Francophone Africa have only gotten a tiny fraction of the continent’s total venture capital. However, she believes that Ejara’s fundraising round gives some optimism, especially in the field of fintech, which is still relatively underdeveloped in the region.