Jem, which is currently used by 200+ companies and over 250,000 frontline workers, has expanded from HR and benefits into a workforce management platform, with new products such as time-and-attendance, credit scores and EAP already in place and products like rostering, LMS and more in beta. The series A fundraising, led by Quona Capital, helps to accelerate our growth and the speed at which new products can launch, to better serve Africa’s deskless workforce.
We are the workforce management platform for deskless teams, the millions of people who keep the economy moving without ever sitting behind a desk, built on WhatsApp. And we are incredibly proud to announce our recent fundraise, led by fintech investor Quona Capital, with participation from the University Technology Fund, E4E, Next176/FutureGrowth and a group of prominent angel investors including former Old Mutual CEO Iain Williamson.
“We backed Jem because it sits at a powerful intersection: essential workforce software that lets companies build a deeper relationship with their people, trusted employer distribution, and embedded financial services that save everyday South Africans meaningful amounts,” says Johan Bosini, Venture Partner, Quona Capital. “Its WhatsApp-based platform is becoming important infrastructure through which employers communicate with, manage and support their workforces,” he explains.
Quona Capital is arguably one of the most respected fintech investors in emerging markets, managing a $750m AUM.
Adding to the above, Johan says: “Jem has already demonstrated strong product-market fit. It serves over a quarter-million employees, has grown recurring revenue by more than 100% year on year, and has achieved approximately 120% net revenue retention with negligible customer churn.”
“What ultimately convinced us was the combination of customer love and commercial execution. Employers increasingly view Jem as operational infrastructure rather than a standalone financial product. The company has grown rapidly while maintaining exceptional retention, demonstrating that the platform is solving a meaningful and recurring problem,” explains Johan.
“Jem is the workforce management platform for deskless employees,” says Jem’s Co-founder and CEO, Simon Ellis. “Employers have spent years stitching together a dozen disparate systems to run their teams. Jem is now the one place they can do all of it,” he says.
“Many employers still run their workforces on a patchwork of legacy systems built over the last two decades, from earned-wage-access point solutions to workforce-communication tools,” says Jem’s Commercial Director, Chris Hellmann. “Jem replaces that patchwork with one platform, built on WhatsApp,” he explains.
That single platform is anchored by the Jem Hub, that brings connecting, managing and rewarding a frontline team into one place, with deeper insights into a workforce than employers have ever had before.
“We recently launched the new version of our hub, Jem 2.0 with a host of new products, some of which are already live and others which are in beta,” says Simon.
“Jem is not simply an earned-wage-access provider or another HR software product,” adds Johan. “Its WhatsApp-based platform is becoming important infrastructure through which employers communicate with, manage and support their workforces. That creates the foundation for Jem to deliver a wider range of relevant services, including payroll tools, mobile connectivity, insurance and other employee benefits to a user group that is largely inaccessible by traditional financial services,” says Johan.
“We’ve created a waitlist for customers who want to be the first to gain access to these new tools and products, which can be found on our products page on our site: jemhr.com,” says Simon.
Founded in 2020 as SmartWage and rebranded as Jem in 2022, the company started with a simple idea: let employees draw wages they had already earned, over WhatsApp, with money arriving within 90 minutes. Since then, it has grown to cover payslips, onboarding, time and attendance, leave, workforce communication and much more.
“We started Jem because a huge industry, payday lending, was profiting from employed people struggling with cashflow, entirely outside the employer-employee relationship, and costing them roughly ten times more,” explains Caroline van der Merwe, Co-Founder and COO.
Earlier this year, Jem was named one of Bloomberg’s top start-ups to watch in Africa, one of only four South African businesses to make the list. Read the article here.
“Over the years we’ve been gradually building up our feature set, incrementally going through each challenge and building a solution for it,” explains Caroline of the businesses evolution. “Our vision has always been to join the dots into one workforce management platform, and this raise, together with AI, lets us do that far faster.”
“We have been impressed by Jem’s progress, the strength of its team and the scale of the opportunity ahead. We are proud to increase our investment,” says the University Technology Fund’s Managing Partner, Wayne Stocks.
Jem now serves more than 250,000 employees across 200+ companies, including leading industry brands such as Servest, KFC, Meridian, The Capital, Edgars, Illovo and more.
“Jem’s differentiation starts with engagement. Many HR systems are designed for people sitting behind a computer. Jem is designed around the realities of deskless workforces and reaches employees through WhatsApp, where engagement is immediate and intuitive,” says Johan of Jem’s tooling.
“Jem also combines employer-facing software with employee-facing financial services. The HR tools create trusted, recurring engagement; the financial products then solve tangible employee needs. That combination is difficult to replicate because it requires strong technology, deep employer integration, regulatory discipline and the trust of employees,” adds Johan. “The result is not merely a collection of products. It is an increasingly valuable distribution and operating layer between employers and their workforces.”
“We don’t call ourselves AI-native, we’d rather show you,” says Thamsanqa Moyo, Jem’s CTO. “Employers can now connect to Jem through a secure MCP connection and get real work done from inside the AI tools they already use, sending payslips, approving leave or reaching their teams, without a big integration project.”
Adoption is where Jem stands apart from its competitors, because everything runs inside WhatsApp, the app that the majority of people already use every day. For an employer, that is the difference between software that gets bought and software that actually gets used.
“Jem is one of our most innovative, forward-thinking service providers. We love the team. We love their energy, and they have made a huge difference to how we connect with, manage, and reward our 18,000 employees at Servest,” says Edward Heynes, Group Executive: Business Excellence, Servest.
“We spend most of our lives at work, so improving that experience for others is far more significant than people give it credit for,” explains Danielle Lifschitz, People Lead at Jem. “What we’re building both makes HR teams more efficient and it makes the employee experience better, and a better experience means happier people who are more engaged and productive,” she says.
“The biggest thing about Jem is that our staff love it. It’s easy to register, intuitive to use, and genuinely helps them save money. It’s been instrumental to our KFCs: our HR and Ops teams have materially improved their processes, and we’re always early adopters of Jem’s new solutions because they build things that actually work for our environment,” says Chris Lister-James, KFC Albimix.
“We are deeply impressed by Simon, Caroline and the wider team,” adds Johan. “They are extremely ambitious about what Jem can become, but equally rigorous about execution, customer outcomes and building a sustainable technology-led business.”
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