Ghanaian-based fintech platform, Dash, has secured $32.8 million in a new funding round led by New York-based Insight Venture Partners, Investors King understands.
Dash had also secured an earlier pre-seed round of $500,000 in what has been described as one of the largest fundraisings in Africa after PalmPay’s $40 million and Flutterwave’s $250 million earlier in the year.
Founded in 2019 by Prince Boakye Boampong, Dash provides a unified payment system for customers to transact easily between mobile money and other various payment platforms.
While financial transactions are carried out majorly by global payment processors like Visa or Mastercard, communication between these processor platforms, fintechs and traditional banks have evolved over the years to settle transactions for consumers and businesses swiftly.
However, for a less predominantly ‘card using’ continent like Africa, there are a number of options for transactions with telecommunications solutions and traditional banks via mobile money, leading the majority of online financial transactions carried out in the region.
While the systems tend to work perfectly well, the challenge with them is that there there’s no interoperability for transactions between them. However, Dash has created an alternative payment network where connected wallets can allow a mobile money user to transact with a bank account seamlessly.
Before starting Dash in 2019, Boakye was the co-founder of OMG Digital, a Y Combinator-backed media startup in Ghana which Boakye started alongside Jesse Ghansah — the current CEO of Float— in 2016.
Dash currently operates in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya.
Speaking about the startup, Boakye said: “We’re building this interoperability so a Kenyan travelling to Ghana or Ghanaian travelling to Kenya would be able to pay for stuff without having to change currencies or setting up accounts when they touch the ground. We’re taking a page from AliPay and PayTm by building features that will make the lives of our users easier without having to switch from different providers.”
The startup’s product is very similar to Visa or Mastercard as Dash routes payments through banks and telcos regardless of who issued it.
According to the company, Dash has processed over $300 million in TPV in January, up 300% monthly from Q4 2021. In total, the startup has also processed over $1 billion since its launch in 2019 and from 1 million customers the company has acquired from Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria.
