Ejara has raised $8 million in a Series A investment, which will be used for the development of the investment app.
Anthemis co-led the growth round. Last October, Anthemis led the $2 million seed round for Ejara.
Other investors in this new financing include other follow-on investors and new investors. One of the angels is the co- founder of Blockwoks.
Ejara wants to make it easier to access investment and savings products. While its recently launched savings product where it tokenizes government bonds is one of the ways it usesBlockchain, so is its crypto product which was crucial to the two-year-old startup raising $10 million in less than 18 months
By giving users in Francophone Africa an option to buy, sell, exchange and store their investments, CEO Nelly Chatue-Diop and her co-founders saw an opportunity to increase activity in the area. Ejara offered customers the option of non-custodial wallets so they could own and store their keys. It paid off when the collapse of FTX underscored the need for customers to prioritize privacy and ownership when dealing with cryptocurrencies.
When people were building centralized exchanges, we always thought that they needed to own their keys. "That's pretty much what saved us in turbulent times."
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In a region where access to financial products is limited to the most informed and wealthy, Ejara has caught on quickly. Users could use stable coins to make cross-border transactions. Users on the platform have grown in multiples over the last year. In October of last year, it had 8,000 users from all over the world. Over 70% of it's users are in nine African countries.
Ejara has seen revenue growth 10x and achieved a 15% month-on-month transaction volume growth since last October, and is expected to reach 100,000 users by the end of the year, according to chatue-diop. In a statement, Ejara said that its savings product was the first of its kind in the industry. In an environment where many people around the world are trying to find use cases for Blockchain technology, Ejara has shown that emerging markets are likely to pioneer many such innovations in web3.
Users don't need to set up a bank account to access savings products if they download the Ejara app and deposit a minimum of 1,000CFA Franc. The platform allows users to earn up to 10% interest on their two-year deposits.
Traditional asset managers and banks are competing for treasury bond business. She said that they mainly target high net worth individuals and institutions like other banks or insurance companies. The man driving a motorbike for a living is not being targeted. Many people come to our platform because they can save up to 1000CFA Franc a day.
Ejara wants to be a financial super app for users in French-speaking Africa and people in the diaspora who send and invest money back home. According to Mia Deng, a partner at Dragonfly, Ejara is well-positioned to imitate the growth of China's Alipay and WeChat Pay in the early 2010s and help the Francophone region achieve a web3 financial leap in the coming years.
Ejara wants to become a one-stop-shop for products tailored to the needs of Africans: a shop where a suite of financial products will be accessible at their fingertips.
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The path to a million users is dependent on how quickly the target audience catches on to the nuances associated with savings and investments. It is one of the reasons why the fintech is promoting a couple of non-profit initiatives to teach the public, particularly women, girls and orphans aboutcryptocurrencies, savings, investments, and financial education.
The financial literacy and computer skills of women and orphans are being improved. When I think about Ejara, I think about the community as a whole, whether they are in Africa or the diaspora, whether they belong to the elites, or they are in the poorer layers of the community.
The largest equity round in the country was announced last week. One of the most funded companies in the country is Ejara. There are two similar events in a short period of time. Though it is too early to say, it appears that the market is embracing innovation and is becoming more attractive to foreign investors despite the current global downturn.
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