Why and how to start a for-profit company serving emerging markets

Abstract

Wave (1) is a for-profit, venture backed startup building cheap, instant money transfer to and within Africa. Since launching in 2015, we’ve become by far the biggest remitter to Kenya and Ghana, saving our users and recipients over $100 million so far. Our biggest source of expected future impact is building mobile money systems within Africa, which will have an orders-of-magnitude bigger impact if it succeeds.