Jambo raises $7.5m to launch in 5 universities in Q1
By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Jambo, a fintech, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding to move Africa closer to financial prosperity through its Web3 ecosystem.
The startup, which is based in Congo with operations in several countries on the continent, plans to use the investment to drive its vision to build Africa’s Web3 user acquisition portal.
It wants to do this by allowing users to learn, play, and earn at the same time while also democratising access to crypto-based income-generation opportunities.
Jambo also disclosed that it is testing out over 10 play-to-earn games which would be launched in the coming months.
Jambo co-founder and CEO James Zhang said the fintech wants to onboard users to Web3 across Africa with its application using a dual approach that allows users to execute Web2 and Web3 activities.
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Acquisition strategy
Jambo’s main user acquisition strategy is to double African airtime and data to allow users save while using the app.
It partners with telecom providers to get 70 per cent discount and sell directly to its users at a 50 per cent discount from the original cost, as reported by Nairametrics.
“The reason we can do that is via partnerships with these companies as we tokenise a part of their advertising budget and directly provide to the end-user.
“Many Web2 incumbents or even Web3 are having a $100-200 user acquisition costs, so we can lower that by order of magnitude by directly incentivising the end-user,” Zhang explained.
He said the company wants to popularise Web3 play-to-earn games which are not so popular in Africa due to a lack of infrastructure (guild) to create them.
He confirmed that Jambo does not plan to take a cut from user earnings as revenue would come from Web2 model spanning from charging advertising dollars and commissions from selling airtime and data.
“Education is at the core of what we do because I think there is no shortcut in Africa. You have to educate the user base before you can even think about monetising or start to acquire users at the end of the day.
“This is why we are launching classes with a full curriculum on Web3. We plan to launch that in more than five universities in Africa by the end of Q1.”
Jambo said it has signed up over 12,000 students across 15 African countries including Nigeria, Ethiopia, Zambia, Uganda, Kenya, and Congo to explore play-to-earn gaming and decentralised finance (DeFi).
