Djamo is recognized as one of the specialized digital banking startups focused on serving the large underbanked population across Africa. Unlike many competitors who primarily target massive markets such as Nigeria, Egypt, or South Africa, Djamo has established a distinct and highly successful operating model within Francophone West Africa. Specifically, the company has achieved considerable scale in the Ivory Coast and has recently expanded into Senegal, currently serving a customer base exceeding one million across these two nations.
The fintech, which is a graduate of the prominent Y Combinator accelerator program, recently secured $17 million in new equity financing. This capital infusion is intended to expand the range of financial products available to its existing retail customers and to the thousands of small businesses it has brought onto its platform over the past couple of years. Notably, this equity round is the largest ever successfully completed by an Ivorian startup, significantly surpassing Djamo’s $14 million Series A round from 2022. This performance strongly indicates that investors maintain high confidence in the company’s core mission to deliver banking services that are both accessible and affordable.
Hassan Bourgi, who co-founded Djamo with chief product and technical officer Régis Bamba in 2020, chose not to publicly reveal the new valuation of the company. However, Bourgi confirmed that the firm’s valuation has successfully doubled since its last funding event.
The fundamental reason Bourgi and Bamba founded Djamo was to address the critical financial access gap prevailing in French-speaking African countries, where a very small percentage of the adult population holds formal bank accounts. Traditional banks in this region frequently cater only to the affluent segment of society, leaving the majority of the population dependent on mobile money. Mobile money is a cheaper, widely adopted method that facilitates financial transactions using only phone numbers.
Mobile money has undoubtedly played a crucial role in expanding financial access across Africa. As reported by the World Bank in 2022, only 28% of adults in sub-Saharan Africa had a mobile money account, yet this region alone holds over half of the global total. Despite this progress, mobile money’s utility has reached a service ceiling. Most mobile money platforms are restricted to offering only basic services such as simple cash-in, cash-out, peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers, and bill payments. While practical, they do not provide the gateway to more sophisticated financial tools necessary for wealth building, such as credit, investment opportunities, or long-term savings products.
Djamo is strategically positioning its offerings as a bridge between the foundational mobile money systems and comprehensive traditional banking services. The startup provides the accessibility characteristic of mobile money combined with the financial depth associated with a modern bank account. This is a proven strategic blueprint that companies like SoftBank-backed Opay and Transsion-backed PalmPay have utilized to scale to tens of millions of customers in Nigeria.
The company is targeting a rapidly evolving segment of users, predominantly younger individuals, who feel they have outgrown the limited functionality of mobile money wallets but still find established traditional banks to be inaccessible, expensive, or technologically outdated, according to the founders. Bourgi emphasized that these users are evolving their needs but reject going to institutions with predatory pricing that are not adapted for the new generation of customers, noting that Djamo is aiming to become the go-to bank for this huge cohort seeking more complex, wealth-building financial opportunities.
Following its last public funding announcement, Djamo has significantly expanded its suite of products beyond simple card services and peer-to-peer transfers. The Ivorian fintech now offers specialized savings vaults, diverse investment products—made possible by securing the region’s first fintech-issued brokerage license—and salary-linked bank accounts, which Bourgi views as essential for enhancing customer engagement and loyalty.
Consistent with many neobanks, Djamo attracts banked users who utilize the app primarily as a convenient secondary account for bill payments and mobile money integration. However, it is the unbanked population, although harder to initially onboard, that holds the greatest long-term potential. These users constitute over 55% of Djamo’s overall customer base and often treat the application as their primary financial service provider. Bourgi reported that nine out of every ten users who rely on Djamo as their main account belong to this previously excluded segment. To better reach and activate more of them, Djamo has adopted a hybrid operational approach, combining its digital application with a network of offline agents who meet customers in person to facilitate transactions, a model now more widely utilized by fintechs across the continent.
Currently, only between 5% and 10% of Djamo’s users receive their salaries directly through the application. Bourgi stated that the next critical phase for the company involves figuring out how to successfully transition from 10% to 50% of its users having their salaries paid directly into Djamo.
Simultaneously, Djamo is actively scaling up its services designed for small businesses, a segment that currently includes approximately 10,000 entities, many of whom began as individual retail users. According to CTO Bamba, the startup now equips merchants with bulk payment tools, payment links, and QR code tools to facilitate the acceptance and management of payments directly within the app.
The fintech generates its revenue from merchant fees levied on online card purchases and a premium tier plan that is subscribed to by 25% of its user base. Bamba further mentioned that the company is exploring additional revenue streams, including potential lending services and earning interest on customer deposits. To implement these, the company is in the process of securing the necessary licenses that will authorize it to offer credit products and interest-bearing savings accounts.
Djamo’s founders state that the company has achieved a 5x growth in revenue since 2022 and has processed a total of more than $4.5 billion in transactions since its launch.
With its recent strategic expansion into Senegal, Djamo has entered a market where Wave, recognized as one of Africa’s largest fintechs known for low-cost mobile money transfers, is highly dominant. Djamo, however, positions itself as a complementary service, providing a full digital banking experience where users can store funds and access more advanced tools like savings, investments, and credit, rather than engaging in direct competition on basic money transfers.
The 250-person team at Djamo is confident that this new funding round, which was led by the Pan-African, gender-focused venture capital firm Janngo Capital, will provide the resources needed to effectively scale these services across the entirety of French-speaking Africa.
Fatoumata Bâ, founder and executive chair of Janngo Capital, expressed her enthusiasm for the investment, stating: “We are thrilled to lead the largest VC round in Ivory Coast and double down on Djamo, a mission-driven fintech transforming access to financial services across Francophone West Africa.” She highlighted the profound importance of the company’s mission in a region where fewer than 25% of adults have access to formal financial services and where women are twice as likely to be financially excluded. Bâ noted that with women making up a third of its user base, Djamo is not just working to close the financial gender gap but is actively unlocking economic opportunity at scale.
Other notable investors who participated in the round include SANAD Fund for MSMEs (micro, small, and medium enterprises), which is managed by Finance in Motion; Partech; Oikocredit; Enza Capital; and Y Combinator.
