Djamo wants to be Francophone West Africa's bank
The Abidjan neobank is raising a $40 million Series C to push beyond payments into credit and savings across Senegal and the wider WAEMU bloc, chasing what Wave and Flutterwave have already proven: scale is possible for a homegrown African fintech.
Forty-four percent. That is the share of adults in Côte d'Ivoire who, as of the most recent World Bank data, still have no formal bank account — no savings account, no line of credit, nothing beyond cash and, increasingly, a mobile money wallet.
Djamo, the Abidjan-based fintech founded in 2020 by Hassan Bourgi and Régis Bamba, is betting that gap is now big enough, and mature enough, to build a $40 million Series C around. Bourgi and Bamba told ITWeb Africa in an interview in Abidjan that Djamo is preparing the raise to fund expansion across Francophone West Africa, building on the $17 million round it closed in April 2025 — at the time the largest ever for an Ivorian startup — and a $14 million Series A in 2022. Altogether the company has raised $31 million in equity and $5 million in debt from backers including Y Combinator, Partech and Janngo Capital.
Graduating past the wallet
Mobile money already solved the hard part of financial inclusion in West Africa: getting money to move. Wave, the region's dominant mobile money operator, built a business on 1% transfer fees and free cash-outs that undercut telecom incumbents on price alone. What mobile money never quite solved is what happens after the transfer — savings that earn something, credit that isn't informal, a card that works for an online purchase in euros or dollars.
That is the specific gap Djamo is building against. The company offers bank-backed credit cards, mobile loans, current accounts and remittance services, structured as a technology layer on top of licensed banking partners rather than a bank itself — a deliberate choice, its founders say, to move fast without carrying full banking-license overhead in each of the eight countries that make up the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU).
"We are now focusing on entrenching profitability in our home market and accelerating growth into other markets in Francophone West Africa," Bourgi said. "To achieve that, we are targeting to raise $40 million for our Series C round."
The company says it now serves more than two million users across Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal, which it entered more recently, and has a stated ambition to expand across the WAEMU zone's shared regulatory framework — a genuine structural advantage in a region where a single central bank, the BCEAO, governs monetary policy across eight countries at once.
Why this is a harder trick than it looks
Competing for Djamo is not simple, and the field is not empty. Wave, valued near unicorn status, is itself moving in the opposite direction — incorporating a banking entity, Wave Bank Africa, with roughly $35 million in paid-in capital, precisely because it wants what Djamo is chasing: deposits, credit and direct access to the region's core payment rails, rather than thin transaction margins alone. Telecom operators have also been squeezing the model that made Wave's rise possible in the first place, scrapping withdrawal fees and cutting peer-to-peer costs to near zero.
Djamo's answer is to not compete on the wallet at all. Its pitch to investors is that it isn't trying to out-cheap Wave on transfers; it wants to be the next step up — the product a mobile money user graduates to once a wallet stops being enough. That is a narrower, more specific bet than "digital bank for Africa," and it is also, on the numbers Djamo is citing, a real and growing market: financial inclusion in Côte d'Ivoire has climbed from 41% in 2017 to 58% in 2024, according to World Bank figures cited by both the company and independent reporting — meaning millions of newly banked or partially banked adults are exactly the customers a credit-and-savings product needs.
The company is also, notably, staying out of the crypto trade that some of its regional peers have chased. Rather than build on Bitcoin or a private stablecoin, Djamo says it is in early discussions with Côte d'Ivoire's central bank about a regulatory sandbox for a fiat-backed digital settlement instrument aimed at cutting the cost of cross-border business-to-business remittances — a more conservative, regulator-friendly path toward the same destination.
The scale test
If Djamo closes the round anywhere near $40 million, it would put the company in rare company: a small handful of homegrown African fintechs — Wave and Flutterwave among them — that have reached that scale without a foreign parent or an acquisition. That matters beyond one company's balance sheet. Francophone West Africa has historically drawn a smaller share of the continent's venture funding than Nigeria, Kenya or South Africa, despite a shared-currency, shared-regulator advantage that, on paper, should make it easier to scale a single fintech product across borders. A successful raise validates that thesis for investors who have been slower to write big Francophone-Africa checks; a stalled or downsized round would suggest the region's structural advantages don't yet translate into investor confidence at this size.
For now, Djamo's own numbers are what they are: self-reported, not yet confirmed at final terms, and describing a raise still "targeting" close rather than one that has closed. What is independently verifiable is the track record behind it — two prior rounds, a widening user base, and a regulatory environment built for exactly the kind of cross-border expansion Djamo says it now wants to make.
