Goldman Sachs leads $52m funding round for JUMO
Goldman Sachs leads $52m funding round for JUMO
JUMO, which claims to be “the largest and fastest growing technology platform for operating inclusive mobile financial services marketplaces”, has closed an equity funding round of $52 million, led by Goldman Sachs.
Other investors include Proparco, the private sector financing arm of the French Development Agency (AFD), Finnfund, Vostok Emerging Finance, Gemcorp Capital, and LeapFrog Investments.
Goldman Sachs, Proparco and Finnfund are JUMO’s new investors.
Since its launch in 2014, more than nine million people have saved or borrowed on the JUMO platform, with nearly 70% of these being micro and small business owners. To date, JUMO has originated over $700 million in loans on its platform and manages over 25 million customer interactions per month. Through its existing partnerships, nearly 120 million mobile users are currently able to connect to the JUMO platform.
The company has over 350 employees across Africa and Asia, approximately two-thirds of which are specialists in the areas of software engineering, data science, prediction, analytics and finance.
It has offices in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana, Zambia, Pakistan, the UK, Singapore and South Africa.
The new funds will be used for the expansion to new markets, the company says.
Andrew Watkins-Ball, CEO of JUMO, who has relocated to Singapore to support the company’s growth in Asia, comments: “The support of Goldman Sachs and our other investors is a significant endorsement of JUMO.
“We are proving that the evolution of computation and storage means that there is no longer any reason why the best financial products should not be available to people in the early stages of building wealth.”
Jules Frebault, executive director at Goldman Sachs, believes “there is immense opportunity across Africa and beyond for JUMO”.
Over two billion people in the world have limited or no access to essential financial services, many of them live in emerging markets and are coming online for the first time via mobile. These are the people JUMO is connecting with to provide them choices from various banks.
JUMO’s offering, available as Platform-as-a-Service, provides transactional capability via basic USSD, web or app.
