Cameroon’s Ejara Closes $2M Seed Round, New Zealand’s Easy Crypto Raises $12M

Cameroon-based Ejara raises $2M 

Cameroon Financial services platform Ejara has raised a seed round of $2 million led by Coinshares Ventures and Anthemis Group, the company said Thursday. 

Other investors include Mercy Corps Ventures, Lateral Capital, LoftyInc Capital Management and NetX Fund, and a group of angel investors including CEO of Ledger Pascal Gauthier, Blockworks Co-founder Jason Yanowitz, and AngelList’s Socially Financed Fund.

“By 2030, Africa will represent one of the world’s largest economic regions, and despite having nearly 25% of the continent’s population, Francophone African startups have attracted less than 1% of the venture capital in the African tech scene,” Meltem Demirors, chief strategy officer at CoinShares said in a statement. 

The company was founded in 2020 and is based in Francophone-Africa, specifically Cameroon, and tailors its platform for African markets. The name “Ejara” derives from Bambara dialect and means “lion,” which coincides with their mission to put the power in people’s hands, the company said. 

The funding will be used toward expansion and growth strategies, Nelly Chatue-Diop, founder of Ejara said to Blockworks in an interview. Since its launch, the platform has grown 25% month over month for its user base and increased transaction volume by 35% during the same period, Chatue-Diop added. 

“We want to expand as quickly as possible,” Chatue-Diop said. “We started with crypto but aim to add stocks and fractionalized stocks, commodities and bonds and US foreign ones. So we can grow quickly, we need more tech, growth and focus on support,” she said. 

Ejara started out in Cameroon, but has diversified across the Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea, and Senegal as well as the Francophone diaspora in Europe & North America through its partnership with Moonpay, the company said. 

The mission is all about protecting the African people’s money, Chatue-Diop said. 

“It’s about protecting their wealth, diversifying their savings and growing their wealth. Historically, when you have savings in Africa, where do you invest? Banks give you 1% maybe, but you’re at the mercy of them closing and going away with your money,” she added. 

A lot of Africans invest in real estate as a way to store their wealth, but when someone needs to abandon their homes and fly quickly out of their zone, they can’t take their real estate with them, Chatue-Diop noted. But, with platforms like Ejara, people can take their bitcoin and digital assets anywhere, she said. 

“We are at the mercy of inflation, but diversifying into bitcoin and other assets will protect people against the debasement of their currency,” Chatue-Diop said. 

Easy Crypto raises $12M to expand into Southern Hemisphere

New Zealand-based Easy Crypto closed its $12 million Series A round led by Nuance Connected Capital, the company announced Wednesday.

The lead investor in this round is sovereign-backed, meaning that the New Zealand government supports and funds Nuance Connected Capital and in turn, is indirectly supporting the crypto ecosystem, Janine Grainger, co-founder and CEO of Easy Crypto said in an interview with Blockworks. This was the company’s first fundraise and prior to this Series A, Easy Crypto was fully bootstrapped, she added.

The round was oversubscribed by fifty percent and includes investment from others, including a pension provider Pathfinder and Indonesia-based GDP Venture. Additionally, US-based Hutt Capital, Icehouse Ventures, Even Capital and Seven Peaks Ventures also participated in the round.

Easy Crypto is a retail platform founded three years ago by siblings Janine and Alan Grainger. The platform provides customers the ability to trade over 150 cryptocurrencies and has recorded over $750 million in sales and has multiplied its users over five times in the past year, the company said. 

Currently, it is available in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Brazil, Grainger said. But the funding will be used to expand into new customer markets in Southeast Asia and other Southern Hemisphere countries that have a need for products and services, she added.