Inside Chipper Cash’s Grueling Battle To Survive The Fintech Winter

Valued at $2.2 billion in 2021, African money-transfer startup Chipper Cash was slow to adapt to the funding collapse of 2022. Now, after layoffs and a deep valuation cut, it’s focusing on the basics–and profitability.

_{Jeff Kauflin, Forbes Staff}

The layoffs at Chipper Cash, a five-year-old fintech startup that lets African consumers send money to each other, started slowly. In July 2022, four recruiters were dismissed. Seven quality assurance engineers came next, two months later. On a Sunday night in early December at 12:01 AM, about 50 employees, or slightly more than 10% of the company, received emails in their personal accounts telling them they no longer had jobs, and access to their work computers had been terminated. Staffers were stunned by the abrupt execution of the layoff. “There was shock and disgust,” a former employee says. Then, after another two months, even deeper cuts came: Chipper slashed about 30% of its staff.

It was a dramatic turnabout for a company that included “lead with empathy” as one of its four corporate values and had been featured in Forbes as one of the most promising startups in fintech just eight months before.