Paytech Dash lands $32.8m seed round to unify Africa’s mobile money wallets
Ghanaian payments app Dash has landed a $32.8 million seed funding round, which it claims is one of the largest seed rounds for an African tech start-up.
Dash founder and CEO Prince Boakye Boampong
The oversubscribed round was led by venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners and saw participation from Global Founders Capital, 4DX Ventures, ASK Capital, Techstars and Zinal Growth Partners.
Notable individual investors include Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau, the founders of German fintech Moss and the founders of French financial management fintech PennyLane.
Launched in 2020 by Prince Boakye Boampong, Dash is an alternative payment network for the 1.3 billion Africans currently transacting digitally. The firm aims to provide a single, unified payment network to facilitate the processing of transactions for consumers and businesses and connect the approximately 200 mobile money wallets found across Africa.
“We are committed to unifying the financial sector in Africa and leveraging its current technological revolution as more than 400 million smartphones and 548 million mobile money users circulate within the continent,” Boampong says.
“Dash will provide a singular solution for all our users, individuals, merchants and banks.”
Dash currently operates in Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria and has processed around $1 billion in customer transactions.
In January 2022 alone, Dash reported a Total Processed Volume (TPV) of more than $300 million, up three times on a monthly basis from Q4 2021.
The company says the cash will be spent on expanding its workforce, developing new features and expanding throughout key markets across Africa.
I am Entrepreneur who made dash app one-of my payment method since January. And to be honest I can receive deposits within seconds to minute without issues but the downside is their withdrawal process… It’s very hard to to have fast withdrawals… You will receive system failure and get replies from customer service claiming that it’s having some technical issues…. And today is March… This has been going for almost 3 months since I started using this app ..
This month March, I was Believing to have a different experience and more successful transfers and deposits and withdrawals but surprisely this is isn’t the case. I have received 3 payments from services I rendered to some people and they all came in successfully without issues but when it comes to withdraws upto day I haven’t been able to withdraw not even one of these payments. How’s that anything good? Once again when I message the customer service; I receive the same automated replies such as “we are experiencing technical issues and our team is working to restore the withdrawals” …. I mean who does that. A company that receives money transfers successfully but fails to provide her users withdrawals of that very same payment. I mean like seriously.
I don’t know how it is done, but honestly I am not the only one complaining about this. Other users are complaining about this too ; some on their playstore reviews, some in person, some also hitting their customer service point and making same complains all to no avail. If I knew how to sue a Company and had the necessary financial resources; I would have definitely sued Dash app and the founder as well… I am doing the necessary research on that. Because how can till date transaction such as Depositing , transfers or receiving payments are successful but withdrawing becomes a difficulty… who does that? Like seriously. It should release all users’ funds and also shut down after doing so – resolve it’s problems and resume. Unfortunately there’s no public statement on any social media platform of theirs nor their website Indicating that they are facing such difficulties from their founder Prince or any of their team members. I put it to them; they shoul be transparent to her users because already if they are boasting of successes which is good then they should come out and talk about their failures as well. This makes a company worth investing in; a company that is transparent to her users…