Chipper Cash Lays Off a Further 100 Employees (1/3 of Workforce) – Claims Crypto Department Still Operational

African cross-border financial and crypto services platform, Chipper Cash, has laid off about 100 employees, which is about 1/3 of its workforce, reports indicate.

Certain departments would have been reduced to a single individual responsible for all operations.

Senior managers went to Linkedin to share the news and ask for help from their former colleagues, including the company's Vice President of Sales, Stefano Perdi:

To my network, there is a pool of incredibly talented people in the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and elsewhere. They all have extensive experience managing very complex and multicultural financial technology teams and projects. Everything from recruitment, HR, marketing, pricing, products, analytics, user experience, research, legal, and more has been impacted." 

The latest news comes barely 3 months after the company let go of 50 employees in December 2022, with the engineering department losing 60% of staff.

According to the CEO, ham serunjogi, the company needs a smaller team after the past two years when they have grown rapidly and the number of employees has increased to 250.

"Given the macro environment, we are currently focusing our efforts on markets and commodities – focusing our efforts where we know we can succeed. The reality of this hypertargeted prioritization is that we unfortunately need a smaller team at Chipper."

At the same time, Serunjogi denied the reports that the company has closed its crypto department, claiming to be one of its major offerings alongside FX and airtime.

'Chipper is one of Africa's largest crypto platforms today, and it remains one of our rapidly growing products. We are excited about the future of crypto in Africa and continue to invest in the product,”

Chipper made headlines when it raised $150 million in a series C extension that valued the company at $2 billion, making it one of only 5 unicorns in Africa at the time. The round was conducted by the failed crypto platform, ftx, with svb capital and ribbit capital participating.

FTX financed about $40 million of the round as the two companies explored how FTX users in Africa could use Chipper Cash to move funds on and off the FTX trading platform

However, a porfolio sheet that emerged amidst FTX’s turmoil in December 2022 revealed that Chipper’s valuation had been cut down to $1.25 billion

Besides Chipper, other African companies that received investments from FTX include:

• NestCoin
• AZA Finance

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