Ghanaian fintech startup Dash raises $32m to connect wallets across Africa

Ghanaian fintech startup, Dash, announced that it has raised $32 million in a seed round led by New York-based private equity and venture capital fund Insight Partners. Other investors in the round include Global Founders Capital and 4DX Ventures. They participated alongside ASK Capital, Techstars, Guillaume Pousaz’s Zinal Growth Partners, Jitendra Gupta of Jupiter Money, Amrish Rau of Pine Labs, the founders of Moss, executives from ProcessOut and the founders of PennyLane.

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.

According to the company, the funding will help Dash expand to new markets such as Tanzania and South Africa, get the licenses needed to operate there, build out its team, invest in technology and launch new features.

The company is currently operational in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and claims to have processed over $1 billion since its launch in 2020 from 1 million customers.

According to Boampong, the idea for Dash came from his earlier travel to Kenya where he experienced the use of M-Pesa and the fact that it was not connected to other payment systems in other parts of Africa.

“I was blown away by the ubiquity and convenience of mobile money in 2014 when I visited Kenya for the first time. However, there are over 200 mobile money wallets and 100 banks across the continent that [do] not work with each other,” he said in a Techcrunch interview.

“We’re building this interoperability so a Kenyan traveling to Ghana or Ghanaian travelling to Kenya would be able to pay for stuff without having to change currencies or setting up accounts when they touch ground,” Boampong said. “We’re taking a page from AliPay and PayTm by building features that will make the lives of our users easier without having to switch from different providers.”

Dash essentially acts as a an interoperable switch connecting banks, mobile money platforms so that customers can carry out transactions across platforms. The platform acts handles the currency conversion.

Dash makes its revenue from processing fees, savings (interest earned when users save), FX fees when Dash is used cross-border, bill payments (commission earned when users pay bills on Dash) and subscription (for Dash+, its premium service).