Image Credits: Julaya

European venture capital fund Speedinvest led Julaya’s pre-Series A extension round. EQ2 Ventures, Kibo Ventures, angel syndicates Unpopular Ventures and Jedar Capital, existing investors Orange Ventures, Saviu, 50 Partners and Ivorian business angel Mohamed Diabi and professional football player Édouard Mendy also invested in the round. 

Mendy’s participation — his first in Africa and second globally — spotlights athletes’ growing involvement in Africa’s venture capital scene. This week, TechCrunch featured

Ivorian payments-led fintech startup Julaya has extended its pre-Series A round by $5 million. The company, which facilitates B2B payments for businesses in Francophone West Africa, mainly via mobile money channels, has raised a total of $7 million in the financing round. 

In 2019, West Africa reported the most live mobile money services in any region, with 56 million active accounts. In Ivory Coast, one of Francophone Africa’s largest mobile money markets, 75% of the population own a mobile money account, compared to 20% who hold bank accounts. It’s why Julaya launched its services in the west African country and has since expanded into Senegal, where mobile market penetration is around 80% as well as other countries in the UEMOA (West African Economic and Monetary Union) region, which also have prevalent mobile money usage. 

Small to large enterprises in these countries can use the Julaya platform to make bulk payments to other businesses and their unbanked employees through existing mobile money channels. But they can now access more services, for example, the startup’s prepaid card — issued by Mastercard — for corporate expense management. The cards are tailored for businesses’ travel needs, other online expenses and easy import of transactions into their accounting systems, CEO Mathias Léopoldie told TechCrunch in an interview. 

“Our sense or strategy with the cards is to provide a full range of service. Because if you have just cards, I don’t think you could build a great startup with a lot traction as you would like, for example, in the U.S.,” said the chief executive, who founded the company with Charles Talbot. “The card payment industry, except for South Africa, maybe Nigeria and a little bit in Egypt, is a developing one and while you might be able to grow a business on that, it’s almost impossible in our region [Francophone Africa].”

Léopoldie stated that offering cards — most of which are physical (upon clients’ requests) — is not the main strategy for Julaya in terms of revenue growth. It’s a switching cost strategy which, according to him, differentiates the fintech from competitors such as YC-backed, which see cards as the main driver. 

More than 40% of Julaya’s 500 small and medium businesses (SMBs), startups, large corporates and government institutions use its corporate expense management feature. While the most significant volumes come from medium to large enterprises, the fintech has surprisingly seen greater adoption from its traditional and non-digitised small clients, remarked Léopoldie. 

Within the past year, the Ivorian-French startup has also extended its range of products to include a “Cash & Collect” solution that allows “fast and secured” cash collection, especially in the FMCG sector. Here, businesses can deposit their cash from physical and field sales into their Julaya account via a mobile money agent branch without going to a bank. 

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https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/21/ivorian-fintech-julaya-gets-5m-to-become-banking-partner-for-businesses-in-francophone-africa/