Nelly Chatue-Web3 Diop’s Startup Ejara Received $2 Million From VCs Without A Marketing Budget And Had 50,000 Users In A Year

According to Nelly Chatue-Diop, only a few wealthy investors seeking to diversify their assets use cryptocurrencies, despite the growth of the middle class in Francophone Africa.

The CFA franc is used by 14 nations in the region, including the Ivory Coast and Senegal. Chatue-Diop, who was born and raised in Douala, Cameroon, claimed that she took this opportunity to try to “level the playing field” for the region. By creating the cryptocurrency investment platform Ejara, which enables users to hedge against currency devaluations and other downturns, she stated she hoped to address the “huge gap.”

That’s the issue we want to resolve, CEO Chatue-Diop said in a recent interview.

By giving people options, we hope to democratize access to saving and investing. starting

The financial services company Ejara, which was established last year, offers interest-bearing savings accounts, the chance to buy, sell, and trade well-known cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum, as well as the ability to invest in fractionalized local and foreign stocks later this year. The early-stage Web3 company not only promotes educational programs via the Ejara School, but also provides a noncustodial wallet for customers to save their money. Comparable to a Robinhood in its early stages, Ejara sets itself apart from other platforms by helping users with every step of their investments and adapting its offers to the CFA currency zone.

Chatue-Diop, who is also a cofounder of the platform, claims that Ejara has decreased the bar for investment in the sector. On the startup’s platform, users can fill their accounts with as low as $1.56, or 1,000 CFA francs.

The company initially spent zero dollars on marketing, according to Chatue-Diop. While other companies were spending a lot of money on social media marketing, Ejara claimed it had success “going door to door, speaking to communities at churches and universities, and onboarding consumers that way.”

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It’s really great when you find a firm and you are sitting where your userbase is, she said, adding that the startup has 50,000 subscribers in less than two years. People have been using Ejara’s services, according to Chatue-Diop, for both wealth management and conventional payment services. The executive claims that women make up approximately 40% of Ejara’s user base and that many of them are mothers who are setting up accounts for their children so that they may begin investing while they are young. Given how disproportionately male the Web3 user base normally is, this percentage is astonishing.

Last year, CoinShares Ventures and Anthemis Group co-led a $2 million financing round that Ejara revealed. Other funders included Lateral Capital, Mercy Corps Ventures, LoftyInc Capital, and NetX Fund, in addition to Jason Yanowitz of Blockworks and Pascal Gauthier of Ledger.
Before Ejara

For Chatue-Diop, the “most inventive thing in IT” has always fueled her passion.

She began her career by working for Credit Suisse and Accenture before assuming leadership roles at a couple artificial intelligence companies. She asserted that the idea that cryptocurrencies were “censorship-resistant” in the sense that their networks were not centralizedly controlled “really stayed in her mind” after reading the bitcoin white paper in 2015.

Less than 30% of people in the Ivory Coast, Mali, Cameroon, and Senegal, according to the World Bank, have a bank account, while about 55% of those people own a mobile phone. This makes CFA franc countries a unique market suitable for expanded usage of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies, according to Ejara investor Mercy Corps Ventures.

According to Chatue-Diop, women are not allowed to own property and struggle to secure land rights in several regions of Africa. Due to this and the low rates of financial inclusion, many people are unable to diversify their income. The devaluation of the CFA franc during Chatue-formative Diop’s years, according to her, devastated millions of families’ finances.

She continued by saying that holding assets using cryptocurrencies frees investors from concern over government interference in their use. She claimed that “this is the first apolitical currency where people can actually access the global economy.” You can keep the item in a noncustodial wallet and lessen the possibility that geopolitical circumstances would affect its value by utilizing Ejara to buy bitcoin, for example.

Ejara’s objective, according to Chatue-Diop, is to have 10 million platform users by 2025.

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We want to disprove blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, she said. Since we believe it is suitable for everyone, we want to make sure that clients don’t think it is too tough to understand.

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