Dash, a Ghanian fintech attempting to create a mobile money equivalent of the Visa and Mastercard networks in Africa, has raised $32.8 million in an oversubscribed seed round.
The round was led by New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners, with participation from Global Founders Capital and 4DX Ventures. Other investors in the round include ASK Capital, Techstars, Guillaume Pousaz's Zinal Growth Partners, Jitendra Gupta of Jupiter Money, Amrish Rau, CEO of Pine Labs, the founders of Moss, executives from ProcessOut (acquired by Checkout.com), and the founders of PennyLane.
While Visa and Mastercard support communications between banks and financial platforms in Western financial markets to settle transactions for consumers and businesses, Africa has no such equivalent for the predominantly telco-led mobile money ecosystem.
Across the continent there are over 200 different kinds of mobile money wallets, none of which work with each other. Dash is seeking to build interoperability into the system by creating a unified financial network and unified wallet for processing transactions across different airtime operators.
Launched in 2020, Dash has processed over $1 billion in transactions with strong growth projections for is operations in Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria. In January 2022 alone, Dash reported a Total Processed Volume (TPV) of over $300 million, up 3X on a monthly basis from Q4 2021.
Dash founder Prince Boakye Boampong comments: “We are committed to unifying the financial sector in Africa and leveraging its current technological revolution as more than 400 million smartphones and 548 million mobile money users circulate within the continent. Dash will provide a singular solution for all our users, individuals, merchants, and banks.”