Cherpie

John Juma spent nine years at Citi, eventually leading operational risk for East Africa and IT projects across Sub-Saharan Africa. His deep banking experience revealed a persistent, expensive pain point: businesses spent countless hours manually reconciling invoices against payments. When he encountered cooperative unions struggling to digitize loan origination and other financial operations through his previous startup, the problem crystallized. Account receivables management was eating up accountant time on mundane tasks when they could be driving strategic value through budgeting and analysis.

In December 2020, John registered Cherpie in Delaware with co-founders Kennedy (product) and James (CTO). The trio went through Antler's 20-week generator program, spending the time "falling in love with the problem" rather than rushing into a solution. This disciplined approach paid off when Antler invested $100,000 in March 2021 based on the strength of the identified pain and the team's banking credentials. After launching properly in April 2021, they spent the next year building product and landing anchor clients in Kenya—payment companies, manufacturers, and pension firms. By the following year, they were ready to raise a Series A, securing $1 million at a $6.5M post-money valuation (selling approximately 14% equity).

Cherpie's go-to-market strategy leveraged John's deep network in African finance. The company built a small but focused sales team of three and combined high-touch direct engagement—booths on the ground, face-to-face client conversations—with digital marketing and earned media. Press coverage in TechCrunch and other publications helped establish credibility. The five anchor customers were all Kenya-based initially, but the company is expanding into the Middle East and North Africa region.

The multi-product approach proved organic. Rather than forcing four product lines, Cherpie discovered them by listening to customer pain: reconciliation for visibility, lending products built on top of outstanding receivables data, trade finance, and virtual accounts. The virtual accounts product is particularly noteworthy—inspired by Modern Treasury's US success—and is scaling through purely organic, word-of-mouth growth. Customer acquisition cost remains high in these early days due to the high-touch sales team, but John expects this to plummet as the product commoditizes and digital channels mature. At $24,000 per annual contract value (roughly $2,000 MRR per customer), the math works for five customers generating $10,000 in total MRR, but scaling will require either more customers or higher-priced deals.

With 14 team members (8 engineers, 3 sales reps) and $1.1M in capital deployed, Cherpie is positioned at an inflection point. The company is proving demand in Sub-Saharan Africa for a solution that replaces the cost of an accountant ($24k/year) with automation. John's vision of Cherpie as "an accountant that never falls sick, is always on time, and reconciles 100% of receivables" resonates in a region where financial operations are still largely manual. The next phase will test whether high-touch relationships and regional strength can scale into a continental business.