Jambo, a startup based in Congo with operations in several African countries, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding to move the continent closer to financial prosperity through its web3 ecosystem.
The new fund will enable the startup to further its drive in line with building Africa’s web3 user acquisition portal by allowing users to learn, play and also earn at the same time whilst also democratizing access to crypto-based income-generation opportunities.
The startup also disclosed that Jambo is testing out over 10 play-to-earn games which would be launched in the next couple of months.
What they are saying
James Zhang, co-founder and CEO, Jambo said it wants to onboard users to web3 across Africa with its application using a dual approach that allows users execute web2 and web3 activities.
The CEO explained that its main user acquisition strategy is to double African airtime and data to allow users to save while using the app, adding that the startup partners with telecom providers to get 70% discount and sell directly to its users at a 50% discount from the original cost.
He said, “The reason we can do that is via partnerships with these companies as we tokenize a part of their advertising budget and directly provide to the end-user. Many web2 incumbents or even web3 are having a $100-200 user acquisition costs so we can lower that by order of magnitude by directly incentivizing the end-user.”
James also said the company is looking to popularize the Web3 play-to-earn games which is not so popular in the region due to lack of infrastructure (Guild) to create them. More importantly, he said Jambo doesn’t plan to take a cut from its users’ earnings as revenue would come from web2 model spanning from charging advertising dollars and commissions from selling airtime and data.
According to him, “Education is at the core of what we do because I think there is no shortcut in Africa. You have to educate the user base before you can even think about monetizing or start to acquire users at the end of the day. This is why we are launching classes with a full curriculum on web3. We plan to launch that in more than five universities in Africa by the end of Q1.”
The startup said it has already signed up over 12,000 students across 15 African countries including Nigeria, Ethiopia, Zambia, Uganda, Kenya and of course, Congo to explore opportunities in play-to-earn gaming and decentralized finance (DeFi).
