Zimbabwean startup, ChatCash, is positioning itself as a pioneer in Africa’s conversational commerce sector.
Founded in 2023, ChatCash embeds payments, sales, and customer management tools directly into the platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
The startup says it wants to eliminate the need for extra apps, offering businesses a way to turn conversations into commerce.
“Business here is built on relationships, and those relationships are nurtured in chat,” founder John Sakala told TechCabal. “Yet most of them are already doing business through conversations. We just needed to turn those chats into commerce.”
What You Should Know
According to ChatCash, it offers three key products:
- SME Suite – enabling catalog creation, invoicing, order tracking, AI-driven customer relationship management (CRM), and integrated payments via EcoCash, InnBucks, Visa, and Mastercard.
- Individual Tools – supporting users in local languages like Shona and Ndebele, while also helping customers discover nearby verified businesses.
- Banking & Regulatory Layer – AI trained on African transaction data to detect fraud and lower transaction costs, designed for banks and regulators.
The startup claims its “Smart Catalog” feature has boosted client sales by up to 30%, while spam-filtering reduces irrelevant messages by 70%, freeing businesses to focus on genuine customers.
What This Means
Unlike many global platforms, ChatCash has baked local language support into its DNA. Its natural language models for Shona and Ndebele boast 95% accuracy in understanding buyer intent, allowing vendors to respond in the languages people trust most.
Backed by the Visa Accelerator Programme and a $1 million Microsoft for Startups grant, ChatCash says it is preparing to secure full fintech licenses by December. That milestone would unlock expansion into South Africa, Nigeria, and Rwanda, with long-term ambitions for global reach.
The startup is also raising a $15 million Series A to grow its client base from 1,000+ to 30,000 businesses within a year. By 2028, it projects $60 million in annual recurring revenue. But Sakala insists that financial metrics are not the only goal.
“Our goal is to empower 100 million Africans to trade seamlessly,” he says. “Because the truth is, inclusive tech in Africa will be built in chat, not in boardrooms.”
Understanding ChatCash’s Model
Innovation in Zimbabwe’s fintech sector comes with steep costs. A USSD access license costs $55,000, while a full payment operator license can run into the millions. To bypass these barriers, ChatCash has positioned itself as an aggregator, working through existing banks and providers.
The startup partners with ZB Bank in Zimbabwe and Secure Trust in South Africa for compliance. Tech giant Microsoft has also provided over $1 million in cloud resources and technical support to train the AI models that power ChatCash.
Zimbabwe’s unstable economy would deter many entrepreneurs, but Sakala believes ChatCash’s B2B2C model, serving both businesses and their customers makes it resilient.
The startup says it has onboarded 8,000 businesses, with more than 1,000 paying clients. Its users range from NGOs managing poultry cooperatives to household names like Simbisa Brands (operators of fast-food outlets across Africa) and the Rainbow Tourism Group.
ChatCash earns through subscription fees averaging $125 per month, performance-based targets, and premium features like voice AI. It also sells enterprise-scale APIs and white-label solutions to banks and governments.
The Rise of Conversational Commerce
According to reports, global spending over conversational commerce channels is expected to reach $290 billion by 2025, up from $41 billion in 2021.
Experts say this has created fertile ground for startups like ChatCash, which are betting on conversation-first platforms to formalize and scale the backbone of African economies.
For now, ChatCash is still in its early stages, onboarding cautiously, adapting its AI to local contexts, and navigating regulatory hurdles. But Sakala envisions something far larger: an operating system for Africa’s informal economy.
If successful, industry leaders say the way Africans buy and sell may no longer center on websites or apps, but on the same conversational platforms where trust has always been built.
Talking Points
It is notable that ChatCash has localized its conversational commerce platform by integrating support for Shona and Ndebele, addressing a critical barrier many African businesses face: language accessibility.
At Techparley, we see how ChatCash’s model of embedding payments, catalogs, and customer engagement directly into WhatsApp and Messenger, could help SMEs operate with far greater efficiency, without the steep learning curve of standalone apps.
The platform’s ability to tie chat-based interactions to financial services such as credit, wallets, and fraud detection also opens the door for SMEs to access formal financial systems, a long-standing gap in Africa’s informal economy.
However, scaling will depend on overcoming regulatory and affordability hurdles. As it expands beyond Zimbabwe, partnerships with banks, trade associations, and accelerator programmes will be crucial to drive adoption and build trust in new markets.
With the right support, ChatCash has the potential to become a key enabler of digital trade across Africa, reframing commerce from an app-first to a conversation-first experience.
