[imagesource: Jumo]

In the fintech world, it’s a good thing to be labelled a unicorn.

A gazelle is a company worth a measly $500 million, but a unicorn hits the mystical $1 billion valuation mark.

Sometimes such a rapid rise doesn’t quite work out – Theranos is a stunning example of that – but it’s looking good for Jumo, a South African fintech start-up with its operational hub in Cape Town.

Jumo also has offices in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana, Zambia, Singapore, and the United Kingdom, reports BusinessTech.

The Hurun Research Institute recently published its Hurun Global Gazelle Index 2021, which lists start-ups founded since 2000 with values in excess of $500 million:

The list of ‘Gazelles’ also includes startups not yet listed on a public exchange, that are most likely to ‘go unicorn’ – hitting a valuation of $1 billion – within three years…

Based on this data, Hurun Research found 525 Gazelles located across 30 different countries and 134 cities..

The USA and China led the list with 201 and 171 startups respectively, together accounting for 71% of the world’s known Gazelles. By city, San Francisco is the world’s Gazelle capital with 59. Shanghai is a strong second ahead of Beijing and New York. At the unicorn level, Beijing is still far ahead of Shanghai.

There is just one South African company on that list and, you guessed it, it’s Jumo.

The company was founded in 2015, has over 250 staff, and $200 million in funding from several rounds of investment.

According to the website, Jumo has “built a smart financial services platform to make finance accessible to everyone”.

It does this in three ways:

Okay, but what does that mean in everyday speak? Put simply, Jumo uses AI to enhance access to credit.

It provides digital financial services to millions across Africa who often do not have access to mainstream banking.

Banks can then make lending decisions via algorithms that predict the probable credit risk of customers, many of whom have little to no credit history.

This week, Global Finance Mag spoke with Andrew Watkins-Ball, the founder and CEO of Jumo:

“Our ability to calculate risk is way better than average… This enables more people to access credit. With a cost of risk as low as 2%-4%, the firm has facilitated access to individual loans for more than 120 million people by observing behavioral patterns on large data sets.”

Nigeria already has more than 200 active fintechs, with the likes of Flutterwave, Interswitch, and OPay achieving unicorn status.

A huge amount of funding is being thrown into African fintechs and Jumo is no different:

Jumo views the funding offers as the necessary muscle to continue innovation and expansion. Apart from growing its tech team, the company intends to broaden its product offerings, partner with global banks and enter at least two new markets in 2022. It also plans to introduce larger and longer-term lending options for merchants and bigger businesses.

Thus far, the platform has been used to make loans totalling $3,5 billion to more than 18 million people across a number of African countries.

I went down the YouTube wormhole and found this video from 2015:

Big fan of the upbeat soundtrack.

Last year, Watkins-Ball did an interview with FinTech Magazine, which included a little background on the founder and CEO:

 Beginning his entrepreneurial career as an event producer, he went on to help establish Gateway Telecommunication, a satellite service provider, in 1991, which he later helped sell to Vodacom for $700mn in 2008.

Between 2000 and 2007, he was also a leveraged finance specialist at Wall Street investment bank Salomon Brothers, where his knowledge guided him to found JUMO.

You can read the full interview here.

That’s about all I’ve got, really.

Good luck, Jumo – go and crack that unicorn status.

[sources:bustech&gfmag&fintech]