According to people with direct knowledge of the situation, Prince Boakye Boampong, the founder and CEO of Dash, which provides an alternative payment network with connected wallets allowing interaction between mobile money and bank accounts in Africa, has allegedly been temporarily suspended pending an investigation into financial impropriety.
Boampong founded the Ghanaian fintech in 2019 and is a well-known serial entrepreneur in Africa, having co-founded OMG Digital, a YC-backed Ghanaian media startup, in 2016. For the time being, the board has replaced him with Kenneth Kinyua, the former CEO of Kopo Kopo, a Pan-African payments company, who recently joined Dash for a role in East Africa. Kinyua takes over as interim CEO.
Dash, which was founded in Ghana and is headquartered in New York, raised $32.8 million in equity last March from investors including Insight Partners, Global Founders Capital, 4DX Ventures, and ASK Capital. The seed round, which valued Dash at slightly more than $200 million, was the second-largest of its kind after PalmPay’s $40 million in 2019. It was also Insight Partners’ first lead investment in an African startup, with the $20 billion behemoth participating in Flutterwave’s Series C round in 2021.
Dash originally planned to raise a quarter of that amount, about $8 million, as its seed round before raising over $30 million. It had accomplished this by October 2021, after acquiring approximately 200,000 users and processing $250 million in transaction volume.
Dash’s total processing volume had surpassed $1 billion and it had acquired a million users from Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria by March 2022, according to Boampong in a March interview with TechCrunch. Within five months, transaction volume increased fourfold and user count increased fivefold. Dash attracted new investors as it reopened and quadrupled its seed round, thanks to its rapid growth and the fintech boom of 2020-2021 that spilled into the first quarter of 2022.
However, in retrospect, Dash’s user and transaction volume growth figures may not have been entirely accurate, as they differed significantly from what TechCrunch typically sees around how other consumer fintech scale.
Indeed, sources told TechCrunch that Boampong was suspended as CEO for allegedly engaging in financial misreporting. Dash’s board, in a joint statement, provided a different perspective on the former CEO’s current status to TechCrunch. Without comment or specifics on Boampong’s wrongdoing, a board spokesperson stated that the CEO was placed on “indefinite administrative leave on January 24, 2023, pending a forensic financial audit of the company.” According to sources, the audit results could be released within a month.
The board expressed confidence in Mr. Kinyua’s leadership and ability to carry out Dash’s mission of creating a unified payments system designed to increase efficiency and accessibility for how Africans transact with digital money.
Meanwhile, sources familiar with the company’s internal operations claim that executives concealed financial information within the company on multiple occasions and described a disorganized workplace where employees resigned and were laid off at will. Boampong was contacted by TechCrunch for comment. According to people with direct knowledge of the situation, the founder did not respond after selling millions of dollars worth of his shares in a secondary sale, a global practice that a handful of African founders participated in during the VC boom over the last two years.
Dash is a unified payments app that combines mobile money and traditional bank accounts to make transactions easier for both consumers and businesses. The fintech’s strategy is similar to that of Visa or Mastercard in that payments are routed through banks and telcos regardless of who issued them. Users from Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya, for example, can connect their bank or mobile money accounts to Dash, pay bills, and send and receive money from other users while the platform handles currency conversions. The four-year-old fintech generates revenue from processing fees, savings, FX fees, bill payments, and subscription fees. It also raised $20 million in debt capital from TriplePoint Capital last October.
