Jambo, a Congo-based firm that is creating Africa’s web3 user acquisition gateway by democratizing access to crypto-based income-generation opportunities through “learn, play, earn,” has acquired $7.5 million in venture funding. According to experts, Africa is set to be disrupted by web3 in the same way that Southeast Asia has become one of the best markets for web3. Due to the acceptance of crypto and play-to-earn models, firms like as Axie Infinity and Yield Guild Games have raised millions of dollars in venture financing.
Africa is the next ripe ground for web3. It has a combination of advantages, such as a fast-growing population — the world’s youngest — solid smartphone penetration, increasing crypto usage, as well as downsides, such as low GDP per capita across the board and unemployment. And a few businesses, such as Jambo, are preparing for the next wave of growth. Jambo intends to onboard millions of users to web3 across Africa through its applications, according to James Zhang, the company’s co-founder and CEO.
After realizing the chance to replicate the success of web3 initiatives in Southeast Asia across Africa, he started the company alongside his sister, both Congo-born Chinese, in November 2021. Although users of Axie Infinity and other guilds receive money just when they play games, Jambo takes a two-pronged strategy by allowing them to earn money when they participate in web2 and web3 activities.
When users utilize Jambo, for example, they can save money on data. According to Zhang, Jambo partners with telecom carriers to obtain a nearly 70% reduction and then sells straight to its subscribers at a 50% discount from the original price. “It’s one of our primary user acquisition techniques,” Zhang explained, “where we aim to quadruple every African’s airtime and data.” Second, Jambo is working with social media businesses to allow users to earn tokens (which can be converted to money) by watching their content on its app.
“The reason we can do that is because we tokenize a portion of their advertising budget and offer it directly to the end-user,” he explained. “Many web2 incumbents, and even web3 incumbents, have customer acquisition costs of $100-200, which we can reduce by an order of magnitude by directly motivating the end-user.” Last but not least, there are games where you can earn money by playing. There are currently no well-known play-to-earn web3 games from Africa, owing to a lack of infrastructure for creating such through Guilds.
Jambo, according to Zhang, wants to construct such infrastructure. Despite this, unlike well-known guilds that collect a percentage of profits from its members, his company has no plans to take a cut from its members’ revenues. Instead, Jambo’s revenue would come from web2 models, which would charge advertising dollars as well as commissions from airtime and data sales. According to the CEO, Jambo is testing over 10 play-to-earn games to promote to its consumers in the next months as the “web3 onboarding portal of Africa.” But how does Jambo expect its idea to take off easily in a region with little or no awareness of web3?
“Education is at the heart of everything we do because there are no shortcuts in Africa, in my opinion.” At the end of the day, you must educate your user base before you can even consider monetizing or beginning to gain users. This is why we’re launching web3 lessons with a complete curriculum. By the end of Q1, we hope to have it up and running in more than five African universities,” he said.
Since the beginning of the year, Jambo has enrolled over 12,000 students from 14 countries (Morocco, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, DR Congo, Tanzania, Zambia, Namibia, Madagascar, and South Africa) in a curated web3 curriculum that can be completed both online and offline. Students will be able to explore potential in play-to-earn gaming and decentralized finance, according to the company (DeFi). Hundreds of ambassadors sign up students at colleges and 600+ physical partner locations where the 10-week programs are offered.
