The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Serunjogi’s partner Moujaled meanwhile had stints at Flickr, Yahoo! and Imgur.
Serunjogi says to succeed he has mainly drawn on his experiences from AKA Mombasa and the bonds among his Academy friends. One such friend is fellow Ugandan Joshua Tibatemwa. They partnered on the AKA swim team. Serunjogi was a good swimmer, having started competing at age six. He enrolled at the Aga Khan Academy in Mombasa, Kenya in 2010 the same year he competed in the Youth Olympics in Singapore.
According to an AKA report, he trained and studied hard, learning leadership and teamwork. He became president of the AKA Student Representative Council. At the Academy he became fascinated by digital communication. In 2011 he conducted a school project back home in Uganda, where he interviewed the IT manager at Cineplex Uganda.
Serunjogi’s drive got the attention of educators and aided his path to the scholarship. Tibatemwa also followed Serunjogi’s example to Grinnell. He also competed for Uganda at the Rio Olympics in 2016.
“The education I gained at the Academy had an emphasis on critical thinking,” Serunjogi explains. That critical ability for problem solving fueled his achievement at Grinnell, along with a conviction that he had something to contribute.
The idea for Chipper Cash appears to have evolved during a trip the cofounders took in 2016, right before Serunjogi moved to Ireland to work for Facebook. The road trip took them from San Francisco to Los Angeles in California, about 600km. They made stops in Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz.
Serunjogi narrates in a story on the AKA website that they spent a lot of time talking about the cryptocurrency space and financial technology (or fintech), and listening to podcasts in the car.
“Part of our excitement about cryptocurrencies and the fintech space came from our frustration over how hard and expensive it is to send money (especially across borders) from one person to another in Africa, given the many different currencies across the continent. This is how the idea of Chipper was born in our minds,” he says.
Chipper Cash went live in October 2018. It is headquartered in San Francisco with offices and operations on the continent.
Chipper was selected by the Stellar Foundation, which develops a blockchain-based payments protocol, as a winner of their annual Stellar Build Competition. That award was a big step: in addition to being worth over US$100,000 for developing the platform, it gained recognition for Chipper in a competitive global spotlight. Within less than a year Chipper had also raised an US$8.4 million seed round by Deciens Capital, a venture capital firm.
In 2019, Chipper raised a US$2.4 million seed round led by Deciens Capital and persuaded 500 Startups and Liquid 2 Ventures — co-founded by U.S. football legend Joe Montana — to join the round, according to a report by TechCrunch, an American online newspaper focusing on high tech.
Once again, Serunjogi’s approach was to make a direct pitch to Montana.
“He was quite excited about what we’re doing and his belief that the next wave of (tech) growth will come from…Africa,” Serunjogi reportedly told TechCrunch.
At the same time Chipper Cash also launched Chipper Checkout: a merchant-focused, consumer-to-business mobile payments product. This is the side of the venture which generates revenue which supports the free Chipper Cash wallet.
That was the same model used by PayPal, the American company offering worldwide online payments system that supports online money transfers and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods like checks and money orders.
But PayPal is limited in Africa and Serunjogi told TechCrunch that he believes there is more volume to be found within Africa.
“Demographics, migration and regional economic-integration within the continent means there’ll be an infinitely growing amount of cross-border commercial activity within Africa,” he said. “When it comes to payments, the pie is growing and…the percentage of that pie that is digital payments will also grow.”
The only offerings are Kenya’s M-Pesa, MTN’s Mobile Money, and TigoPesa in Tanzania.
“Throughout this process, I continue to use and develop on the analytic and communications skills I first encountered at the Aga Khan Academy, along with a commitment to serving social needs,” says Serunjogi, “The foundation that I built for my career and myself with the Aga Khan Development Network still amazes me today.”
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