Chipper Cash

The company was founded in 2018 by Ham Serunjogi, from Uganda, and Maijid Moujaled, from Ghana, who met as students at Grinnell College in Iowa before building the idea on a road trip in 2016. Chipper Cash launched first with peer-to-peer transfers between Uganda and Ghana, then expanded into Nigeria that same year in partnership with Paystack.

Growth was rapid in its first few years. By 2021, Chipper Cash had raised over $300 million from investors including Ribbit Capital, Bezos Expeditions and SVB Capital, and closed a $150 million Series C extension led by FTX Ventures that valued the company at $2.2 billion, making it one of a small number of African fintech unicorns. The turn came in late 2022, when FTX collapsed into bankruptcy, and Chipper Cash responded with a series of layoffs between mid-2022 and late 2023 that cut its workforce by roughly a third in total.

Since then, the company has narrowed its footprint rather than continuing to chase new markets, scaling back operations that once extended to Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and the United Kingdom. By 2026 its active markets were reported as Nigeria, Uganda, Ghana, Zambia and Rwanda, alongside the United States.

On product, Chipper Cash has kept a broader mix than many of the purely payments-focused brands on this list, combining transfers with US stock investing, cryptocurrency trading and USD virtual cards. That mix has helped it hold onto recognition even through the leaner years, including being named a Top Global Fintech Company by CNBC and Statista.