ABA Editorial · Aug 12, 2025 · 16 min read
Wave was founded in 2018 by Drew Durbin and Lincoln Quirk, the same two co-founders who had earlier built Sendwave (the digital remittance company later acquired by WorldRemit for USD 500 million). In September 2021, Wave closed a USD 200 million Series A at a USD 1.7 billion valuation, becoming Francophone Africa's first fintech unicorn. This is the story of how a team that had already built one successful African fintech used that experience to build a second.
In the history of successful African fintech operators, Wave is unusual in one specific way: its founding team had already built and exited a major African fintech before they started Wave. Drew Durbin and Lincoln Quirk, friends since their freshman year at Brown University, co-founded Sendwave in 2014 and grew it into the largest digital remittance company serving African corridors. Sendwave was acquired by WorldRemit in 2020 for approximately USD 500 million. That exit would have been enough for most entrepreneurs to consider their African fintech careers complete. Durbin and Quirk instead launched Wave in 2018 with the mission to bring low-cost digital finance to everyone in Africa, and built it into Francophone Africa's first fintech unicorn within three years. This is the story of how they did it and why the Wave model has proved more durable than most of its peers.
Wave was not a remittance company. Durbin and Quirk had already built one of those. Wave was a mobile money operator, which is a fundamentally different business. Instead of helping diaspora customers send money home, Wave was going to serve the domestic customers who received and spent that money. The thesis was that the existing mobile money market in West Africa was dominated by incumbents (primarily Orange Money and MTN Mobile Money) whose pricing, customer experience, and cost structures reflected an era when mobile money operators had limited competition and could extract significant fees from customers who had few alternatives.
Wave's pitch was aggressive simplicity. Free deposits, free withdrawals, free transfers within the country, and a radically lower cost structure than competing operators could match. The founders had learned from Sendwave that African customers respond to transparent pricing and clean product experiences, and they were willing to invest heavily to acquire customers with a product that was materially better than the alternatives. The bet was that once customers tried Wave, they would not switch back, and the long-term value of the customer base would justify the early acquisition costs.
Wave launched commercial operations in Senegal in 2016, although the formal Wave entity and most of the scaling capital came later. Senegal was chosen for specific reasons. The country had a growing mobile money market, an active BCEAO regulatory framework that provided a clear path for licensed operators, a French-speaking customer base that was underserved by Anglophone fintech operators, and a concentration of financial services activity in Dakar that made it operationally feasible to serve the whole country from a small number of offices.
The early Senegal operations were characterized by one specific strategic choice that defined the company's subsequent trajectory: Wave built a deep agent network rather than relying purely on digital onboarding. In a country where most customers needed to convert cash to digital balance and back regularly, the agent network was the physical infrastructure that made the digital product usable. Wave invested heavily in recruiting, training, and supporting agents, and the agent relationship became one of the company's core operational advantages.
Wave's impact on the Senegalese market came from its pricing. Where Orange Money and other incumbents charged fees for most transactions, Wave offered free deposits, free withdrawals, and free domestic transfers, with revenue coming primarily from a simple 1 percent fee on specific transaction types. This was aggressive relative to incumbent pricing and it triggered a market shake-up. Customers migrated to Wave quickly. The incumbents were forced to respond with price cuts of their own, which they had previously resisted because they assumed their distribution networks gave them permanent market power.
By 2020, Wave had become the dominant mobile money operator in Senegal by customer count and was approaching dominance in transaction volume. Its agent network had expanded to cover most populated areas of the country. And its pricing had forced a structural reset of the Senegalese mobile money market. This was the moment when Wave stopped being a challenger and became the benchmark.
In September 2021, Wave closed a USD 200 million Series A round at a USD 1.7 billion valuation, becoming Francophone Africa's first fintech unicorn and one of the largest funding rounds in African fintech history at that point. The round was led by Sequoia Heritage, Founders Fund, and Stripe, with participation from other investors. The size of the round reflected both the scale Wave had already achieved and the ambition of the expansion plan the capital would fund.
What followed was an aggressive multi-country expansion across the WAEMU zone and beyond. By late 2021, Wave had announced operations or imminent launches in Cote d'Ivoire, Mali, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin, Niger, and The Gambia. This was a more aggressive geographic expansion than any African fintech had attempted at that scale, and it relied on the BCEAO's harmonized regulatory framework to move quickly across WAEMU countries without having to navigate entirely separate regulatory regimes in each.
By 2024 and into 2025, Wave had reached what is commonly reported as approximately 70 percent market share in Senegal by active user count, making it one of the most dominant positions any African mobile money operator has achieved in a competitive market. This concentration is higher than Safaricom M-Pesa's share in Kenya at comparable points in M-Pesa's history, and it reflects how quickly Wave's pricing and product advantages compounded once the network effects kicked in. Agents preferred Wave because it brought them customer volume. Customers preferred Wave because it was where their counterparts were. The reinforcing loop made displacement by competitors extremely difficult.
Wave operates under BCEAO supervision, which sets it apart from most African mobile money operators whose regulatory relationships are with single national central banks. The BCEAO framework has been updated multiple times to accommodate the growth of operators like Wave, and Wave has been active in the regulatory conversations that shape the framework. This is not accidental. Durbin, Quirk, and their senior team understood from the Sendwave experience that regulatory engagement was an operational discipline, not an afterthought, and they built the company with the resources to engage substantively with BCEAO from the start.
Three things stand out. First, the founders brought experience from Sendwave that most African fintech founders lack. They had already seen what works and what fails in African financial services, and they applied those lessons directly to Wave. Second, the pricing strategy was aggressive enough to force a market reset, which created the window for rapid customer acquisition before incumbents could respond effectively. Third, the Francophone West African focus was a choice nobody else was making at the time. Most African fintech capital was flowing to Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt. Wave chose to dominate a region that other operators were ignoring, which gave it years of competitive runway without having to fight the biggest and best-funded rivals.
The question that has followed Wave since the 2021 unicorn round is whether the Senegalese dominance translates into similar outcomes in other countries. The expansion into Cote d'Ivoire, Uganda, Mali, and other markets has been aggressive but the competitive conditions in each country are different. Orange Money has deeper roots in Cote d'Ivoire than in Senegal. MTN has stronger positions in some of the other target markets. And the assumption that Wave's pricing model will replicate the same disruption effect in every new market has not been fully tested.
The company has also not announced a major funding round since 2021, which is either a sign of healthy operations that do not require new capital or a sign of cautious investors in a different venture environment. The fact that Wave has sustained its operations and continued geographic expansion without the need to return to the capital markets is, by most interpretations, the more likely explanation.
Wave's story matters because it demonstrates that Francophone West African fintech can produce operators at the same scale as the Anglophone markets that dominate African fintech narratives. The fact that the first Francophone African fintech unicorn came from outside the English-language coverage ecosystem is a reminder that the markets that matter for African financial inclusion do not always align with the markets that attract the most venture capital attention. Wave also shows that the second-time founder advantage is real: Durbin and Quirk did not learn on the job at Wave the way first-time African fintech founders typically have to. They had learned at Sendwave, and they applied what they had learned to build a better company on the second attempt. That pattern, second-time founders drawing on the experience of earlier exits, is likely to shape the next phase of African fintech as the first wave of successful operators returns to the sector with new ventures.