In 2019, as Sam Njuguna and his partners were looking to set up a unique idea they had to help people save, they came up with a familiar hurdle for entrepreneurs – funding.

The idea was to help instil a savings culture in Kenyans by allowing them to save as little as KSh5 on their mobile phones. The platform, which is an application called Chumz, allows users to create goals for which they want to save, track their progress, and ultimately earn some interest on those savings.

No investor was willing to place bets on them, so they had to use their own money to run the fledgling company’s operations, hoping it wouldn’t run out before they started making money.

“We had to fork all our savings into the solution until a point where now it was essentially generating revenue to run the company,” Sam recalls.

Funding is one of the biggest barriers startups face as they attempt to bring revolutionary ideas to life, especially during the early stages. The fierce competition for limited resources and stringent eligibility criteria for funding are just some of the hurdles they have to jump along the way, which could potentially delay their growth and hamper innovation efforts.

Now in its second year of operations, after being licensed by the Capital Markets Authority in 2022, Chumz is seeking to expand its reach, increase its profits, and better understand the industry.

To achieve all this, Chumz applied to join the Spark Accelerator Programme, a venture capital fund that supports the development and scaling up of relevant tech-enabled startups.

“So, the reason why we joined the Spark Accelerator is because Safaricom, being the biggest telco in the space, gives us an avenue for distribution. Additionally, it gives the opportunity to learn from people in the space in terms of marketing, building solutions and understanding how to scale a company in the FinTech space,” he says.

“The other reason is the funding element which is very crucial for growing startups to scale in other markets,” Sam says.

The Spark Accelerator is a partnership with Safaricom, M-PESA Africa, and Sumitomo Corporation. This year, nine startups were selected to participate in the programme, which will provide them with funding, technical expertise, and mentorship.

“So, one of the things that has been happening is peer-to-peer learning with other founders: what they are doing and what they have learnt along the way. There are also startups in which we have built synergies in terms of supporting each other. For example, there’s one that’s doing social media, and we are very keen to see how they can give us vernacular influencers that we can use for our product. And that’s something we are exploring around that,” Sam says.

Watch the video below to learn more about Chumz and the Spark Accelerator programme.