Prince Boakye Boampong, the founder and CEO of Dash, a Ghanaian fintech that enables users to move money between mobile money and bank accounts, has been temporarily suspended by the company’s board.
His suspension is a result of an investigation into financial misreporting and the sale of millions of dollars worth of his shares in a secondary sale, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation, TechCrunch reported.
Sources familiar with the company’s internal operations alleged that executives repeatedly concealed financials within the firm and described a disorganized workplace where employees resigned and were laid off at will.
Boampong founded the fintech startup Dash in 2019 after co-founding YC-backed Ghanaian media startup, OMG Digital in 2016. Pending the period of the investigation, Kenneth Kinyua, former CEO of Kopo Kopo, a Pan-African payments business, will assume the role of interim CEO.
Dash is a unified payment platform built to improve how Africans transact with digital money. The Techstars-backed startup connects mobile money and traditional bank accounts to facilitate transactions for consumers and businesses.
In March 2022, the New York-headquartered startup secured $32.8 million in equity from Insight Partners, Global Founders Capital, 4DX Ventures and ASK Capital, among others.
The seed round, which according to sources, valued Dash at slightly over $200 million, was the second-largest deal of its kind after PalmPay’s $40 million in 2019.
The startup which launched in 2019 experienced massive growth in user acquisition and processing volume between 2021 and 2022. In October 2021, Dash initially raised an $8 million seed round after it announced $250 million in transaction volume and a user base of 200,000. By March 2022, Dash’s total processing volume had grown to $1 billion and a user base of a million users from Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria.
