The $150Million man.
I have always heard investors say “we want to know if your business is going to be a $100M company” and most of the time, the answer is always no partly because nobody really knows if their company is going to be big but they all share the conviction that they are addressing a large problem.
When i met Dr Ismail the man behind the now famous worldremit he was sure that he had a very special product on his hands and rightly so because he had been working in that industry for more than a decade and had actually started Worldremit to address some of the issues that his clients weren’t taking seriously. Fast forward to today,Dr Ismail is now a $150M man having recently raised an additional $100M led by the world famous Accel partners to take on established players such as Western Union.
This is an exciting development, Worldremit started as a product servicing Africa and the $550 billion global remittance market is undergoing significant disruption with a clear shift to online and mobile solutions for international money transfer.
Dr Ismail is also one of the few Africans who are running a large fin tech company,most of the other large businesses that are serving Africa are in Ecommerce.
The business has been based in London and In December 2014, the company set up a base in Denver, Colorado, with plans to hire aggressively. It now has more than 150 employees at its London headquarters, up from about 40 only a year ago.
So i am delighted to see that from now on every African entrepreneur who dare to dream big and address a big market can certainly believe that he will get funded and create a unicorn just like anybody else.
Dr Ismail is a great role model and i hope to see many entrepreneurs follow in his footsteps.
I was lucky to share the stage with Ismail at the Cambridge Africa Business Network #CABN2014 #BreakingMyths on the Panel talking about Entrepreneurship & Innovation. See full video below:
