Bamboo, a US Stock investment app, has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round. U.S.-based Greycroft and Tiger Global co-led the round. Motley Fool Ventures, Saison Capital, Chrysalis Capital, and Y-Combinator CEO Michael Seibel are some of the other investors in Bamboo’s round.
“What we essentially want to do is to make investing in the global stock market easy for Africans,” said Richmond Bassey, who founded the company with COO Yanmo Omorogbe.
“In accessing investment options, especially in capital markets, both locally and globally, we want to make that easy for Africans because we’re driven to help Africans create and preserve wealth by owning shares in the world’s most successful companies.”
The company said it has more than 300,000 users; of that number, about 20% are active daily traders, while 75% never traded stocks before using the platform. In 2021, repeat depositors made up 85% of deposits on the Bamboo platform.
These users are charged a commission of 1.5% per transaction and about ₦45 (~$0.1) to $45 withdrawals for users with naira or dollar bank accounts, respectively.
Bamboo has competitors in the Nigerian retail investment space such as Chaka, Rise and Trove. They differ in the type and class of securities they offer; for instance, Bamboo gives access to U.S. stocks, ETFs and ADRs, while Chaka deals with stocks and ETFs trading on local and foreign capital markets. But all have been collectively subjected to regulatory issues at home.
“Stocks and selling stocks is a regulated business and currently, we are only live in Nigeria. Working very closely with regulators in Nigeria, we have to work within the ambit of what they are comfortable with and what they allow.
“That’s the extent to which we are offering our services. Perhaps if we launched in other markets and regulators there have a different relationship with a certain asset class, we would also work within the ambit of what they are comfortable with,” said the CEO. He also stated that Bamboo is waiting for approvals from regulators to start offering Nigerian stocks before Q2 this year so Africans and those in the diaspora can tap into investment opportunities on the continent.
The next market for Bamboo is Ghana. Over 50,000 users have joined its waitlist since it announced intentions to launch in the neighboring West African country, the company said. Similarly, there has been some demand from Kenya and South Africa, so Bamboo will look to move into those countries soon with this new funding.
“These are very early days. If you think about it with the kind of technology that we’ve put together, the kind of brand that we’ve created, the access that we do both locally and globally, then we’ve come far, we are a unique team that incept a vision to say we want to get 1 million or 2 million Africans to invest in over the next 18 months and have a great shot at making it happen. We’re one of the few teams that can do that on the continent today, so the future is bright for us,” the chief executive remarked.
Original Story: Techcrunch
