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Wave

Mobile money app for Africa

Building extremely affordable financial infrastructure for Africa.

Wave
Founded:2018
Team Size:1600
Location:Dakar, Senegal

Active Founders

Drew Durbin, Founder/CEO

CEO at Wave

Drew Durbin
Drew Durbin
Sendwave

Lincoln Quirk, Founder/CPO

CPO at Wave

Lincoln Quirk
Lincoln Quirk
Sendwave

YC Sign Photo

YC Sign Photo

Company Photo

Company Photo

Hear from the founders

How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)

Lincoln and I were hallmates freshman year at Brown University. We originally founded Sendwave (YC12) to solve the problem of crazy high fees for sending international money transfers to Africa. I had experienced this problem first hand working on an NGO in Tanzania.As we scaled Sendwave into the largest digital remitter to Africa, we realized there was an even bigger problem moving money domestically within African countries. So, we sold Sendwave and spun out our current business, Wave, to build extremely affordable mobile money for countries in Africa, starting with Senegal.

How did you decide to apply to Y Combinator? What was your experience applying, going through the batch, and fundraising at demo day?

Lincoln had been following YC since it started when we were in college so it was an easy decision to apply when we started working together. By far the most impactful part of YC was building relationships with many great advisors that we still are close with today — over 10 years later!