Yellow Card, a Nigerian-based cryptocurrency exchange has raised a $15 million Series A funding to enable its expansion into other African countries and recruitment of new talents.
Valar Ventures, Third Prime, and Castle Island led the round in Yellow Card. Participation came from Twitter’s Square, Blockchain.com Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Polychain Capital, BlockFi, Fabric Ventures, Raba Partnership, MoonPay, GreenHouse Capital, and more.
Launched in 2018, the Yellow Card team has made efforts to make cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDT stablecoin accessible to everyone on the continent. Currently, the company has a presence in 12 countries, 110 employees across 16 countries, and has grown its userbase in Africa by over 30 times since the start of the pandemic.
Chris Maurice, co-founder, and CEO of Yellow Card said the funding enables the company to achieve its mission of making cryptocurrencies accessible to everyone.
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“Africa is poised to benefit tremendously from cryptocurrency’s potential to transform financial services,” James Fitzgerald, of Valar Ventures said. “We believe in Yellow Card’s vision of a pan-African cryptocurrency platform. What cemented the deal is their multi-national team, which we believe has the local knowledge, technical expertise, and unequivocal passion to address the basic financial services needs of the continent.”
A report by Chainalysis listed six African countries in the top 20 on the Global Crypto Adoption Index. Yellow Card says it wants everyone in the world to see Africa as the prominent region for crypto adoption.
“This raise is a validation that Africa has a major place in the crypto industry,” Munachi Ogueke, Yellow Card’s chief Bitcoin Officer said. “With the access that Yellow Card brings, powered by this raise, we can now let crypto proliferate and be a reliable enabler for people across the continent.”
