Hailing from Africa, Jambo, a fairly new company building a Web3 user acquisition portal, announced on its Twitter thread that it raised $7.5 million in its seed round from some of the big crypto players to build a Web 3 super app for Africa.
The investors include Coinbase Ventures, Polygon Studios, Delphi Ventures, 3 Arrows Capital, Alameda Research, AllianceDAO, Tiger Global, DeFiance Capital, Hashed, UOB, Signum Capital, BH Digital, Yield Guild Games, among others.
Messari’s CEO Ryan Selkis, CEO of Terraform Labs Do Kwon, and Polygon’s CEO Sandeep Nailwal joined in as early investors and advisors.
According to James Zhang, Co-founder and CEO of Jambo, the company’s play-to-earn gaming and decentralized finance (DeFi) services application aims to attract millions of young users in Africa to web3.
“Honestly, anything that helps in Africa – send money, save money, make money – is what we’re testing off of the super app,” he said.
Jambo aspires to be an all-in-one app for Africans, a ‘super app,’ as the announcement reads.
Since January, Jambo has enrolled over 12,000 students from 15 African countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Africa, Nigeria, and Ethiopia, in a Web 3 curriculum designed to give exposure to students of opportunities in play-to-earn and DeFi.
“At first, we thought we were dreaming, embarking on such a crazy ambitious journey to potentially migrate the next BILLION of users into web3…” expressing their contentment on the raise shared the Twitter handle.
There are currently no popularized play-to-earn web3 games from Africa, owing to a lack of infrastructure to create them. Jambo wants to build that infrastructure.
Play-To-Earn is a decentralized approach to turning the traditional gaming experience, and the decentralized nature of crypto assets such as NFTs makes them an ideal match. FTX jumped on this opportunity. It revealed its gaming unit that is going to allow gaming companies to launch native tokens and offer NFTs.
