Ghanaian fintech Dash raises $32.8M seed to build connected walkers for Africans

Prince Boakye Boampong, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer started the company in 2019.  Previously Dash, Boampong was the co-founder of OMG Digital, a YC-backed Ghanaian media startup he started along with side Jesse Ghansah — the predominant Chief Executive Officer of Float— in 2016.

Two years before that, Boampong voyaged to Kenya and was intrigued by how unbanked Kenyans sent and procured money while disbursing bills with mobile money, a strategy of payments inaugurated by Safaricom’s M-Pesa, which has near to 30 million prospects. But having entered from a mobile money background himself, being Ghanaian, Boampong experienced how interoperability posed a challenge within and outside mobile money systems.

An alternative payment network with affiliated wallets authorizing a mobile money user to transact with a bank account would fix this dilemma, and that’s the premise of Ghana-based fintech Dash. Today, the unified payments app is endorsing that it has raised $32.8 million in an oversubscribed seed round.

Dash’s alternative payment system carries together this mobile money and traditional banks and ensures deals for customers and businesses. It doesn’t attempt to reinstate mobile money or banks. Rather, its wallet allows users to access a plenitude of duties they can’t find on their accepted provider.

Dash’s playbook is identical to Visa or Mastercard, routing expenses through banks and telcos regardless of who issued it. So, users from different countries — Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya, for now — can connect their bank or mobile money accounts to Dash, pay bills, and send and receive money to other users while the platform deals with money modifications.

The corporation generates profit 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).

Dash claimed to process over $300 million in TPV in January, up 300% monthly from Q4 2021. In total, it has processed over $1 billion since its launch in 2020 from 1 million customers the company has acquired from Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria, Boampong said.

These numbers reveal the enormous advancement from last October when Dash initially shut down its seed session before re-opening after surging investor interest. At the time, the Ghanaian fintech was putting up $8 million–a large seed in its own right–and had obtained just a little over 200,000 users with transactions surpassing $250 million.

The momentum at which Dash supervised to quadruple the size of its first investment in the space of five months is fascinating. That said, for some investors and spectators, $32 million is an exceptionally substantial seed that could cause more havoc than good for a three-year-old company. But Boampong disagrees.

“For most stocks, it’s either you are predicting gadget out, or you summed it out. We were sort of caught off guard with the crazy advancement in a very frightening way. We didn’t skillful for the growth, so when it emerged, we put up extra money to meet that pressure and we conclude it can simply get better,” he said, citing the company’s enormous seed promotion to a 5x boost in prospect base and understanding volume.

Dash’s seed tour, led by New York-based confidential equity and project capital budget Insight Partners, is one of the massive of its kind in Africa; only PalmPay’s $40 million tops it at the time. The tour, which comes after a $500,000 pre-seed, proceeds with a list of fintech policies inspire a wave of innovation quivering through the territory, which accounted for up to 60% of Africa’s entire VC budget last year.

This contract is also substantial because it takes interest from Nigeria, Africa’s pungent fintech ecosystem, to neighboring project equity elevated by its startups surpassed a meager $16 megaregion last year.

Further investors in the spherical include Global Founders Capital and 4DX Ventures. They contributed 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.