African fintech unicorn Chipper Cash lays off around 12.5% of staff • TechCrunch
Chipper Cash, an African cross-border payments company valued at $2.2 billion last year, has laid off some of its workforce.
Yesterday, a few affected and non-affected employees took to LinkedIn to reveal the news. TechCrunch has learned from sources that more than 50 employees were affected across multiple departments; the engineering team took the biggest hit, with about 60% of the layoffs coming from the department, according to people familiar with the matter.
“This morning a significant number of Chipper employees were given up in a layoff. Although I was not among them, many of my close colleagues and friends were. If you’re looking for talented engineering management, engineers, technical program managers, analysts or IT staff …,” said Erin Fusaro, VP of Engineering at Chipper Cash in her LinkedIn post.
Per LinkedIn, Chipper Cash has about 400 employees, so the layoffs affected 12.5% of the workforce. TechCrunch contacted Chipper Cash for comment.
Last November, the African cross-border payments company raised $150 million in a Series C expansion round led by Sam Bankman-Fried’s now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX. The investment came less than six months after Chipper Cash closed its first $100 million Series C round, led by SVB Capital, the corporate venture capital arm of SVB Financial Group. Since its inception, Chipper Cash has raised more than $305 million from investors including Deciens Capital, Ribbit Capital and Bezos Expeditions.
CEO Ham Serunjogi founded Chipper Cash with Maijid Moujaled in 2018 to provide a free peer-to-peer cross-border payment service in Africa via its app. The services are used across seven African countries – Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda, South -Africa and Kenya. The company began making inroads outside the continent last year. It expanded to the UK – allowing people to send money from the European nation to Chipper Cash’s African markets – and the US – to facilitate peer-to-peer money movement from the US to Nigeria and Uganda. Chipper Cash says it has 5 million users across these markets.
Layoffs have become the norm as rising interest rates and a prolonged bull run that swept private and public markets over the past couple of years, among other things, make life difficult for tech companies. Amid recession fears, investors are tight with their money, mainly toward growth and late-stage startups. As a result, startups have had to cut costs and downsize their workforce to survive; those that have had some success raising capital have had to adjust to pre-pandemic valuations.
Economic headwinds have hit the global fintech area hard. Companies such as Stripe and Klarna have had to lay off employees and trim their valuations. While there have been whispers of African unicorns cutting values internally, only half of this trend has manifested publicly so far in this select group. In June, Wave, an African unicorn offering mobile money services in parts of Francophone Africa, laid off about 15% of its workforce. Chipper Cash has joined the fray with this news. SWVL, 54gene, Sendy and Twiga are examples of medium to large companies on the continent that have also trimmed their workforce.
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