Djamo is one of several digital banking startups targeting Africa’s underbanked. But unlike many that focus on large markets like Nigeria, Egypt, or South Africa, Djamo has carved out a niche in Francophone West Africa, specifically Ivory Coast and more recently Senegal, where it now serves over one million customers.
The Y Combinator-backed fintech just raised $17 million to expand its product suite for retail customers and the thousands of small businesses it has onboarded in the last two years.
The equity round, the largest ever for an Ivorian startup, surpasses Djamo’s $14 million Series A in 2022 and reflects continued investor confidence in its mission to make banking accessible and affordable.
Co-founder and CEO Hassan Bourgi declined to share the new valuation but said it has doubled since the last raise.
Bourgi founded Djamo with chief product and technical officer Régis Bamba in 2020 to close the financial access gap in French-speaking African countries, where few adults have bank accounts. Traditional banks in the region often cater to the affluent, leaving most of the population reliant on mobile money, a cheaper method that includes using phone numbers to make financial transactions.
Mobile money has been instrumental in expanding financial access across Africa. As of 2022, 28% of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa had a mobile money account, per the World Bank, and the region holds more than half of the world’s total. But that progress has also created a ceiling.
Most mobile money platforms offer basic services: cash-in, cash-out, P2P transfers, and bill payments. While useful, they don’t unlock more advanced financial tools like credit, investments, or long-term savings.
Djamo is positioning itself between mobile money and traditional banking. The startup offers the accessibility of mobile money with the financial depth of a bank account, a similar playbook that Softbank-backed OPay and Transsion-owned PalmPay have used to scale to tens of millions of customers in Nigeria.
Its target is a growing segment of users, mostly younger customers, who’ve outgrown mobile money wallets but still find traditional banks expensive, outdated, or inaccessible, the founders say.
“These users are evolving,” said Bourgi. “But they don’t want to go where their parents went, into institutions with predatory pricing and aren’t adapted to the new generation of customers. And this is what we are building, trying to become the go-to bank for this huge cohort of cu …