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Jem, the Cape Town-based workforce management platform built on WhatsApp, has raised $8.4 million in a Series A round led by Quona Capital.
The University Technology Fund, E4E, Next176/FutureGrowth, and a group of angel investors, including former Old Mutual CEO Iain Williamson, also participated.
“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.
Co-founder and COO Caroline van der Merwe explained the origin: “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.”
Founded in 2020 as SmartWage and rebranded as Jem in 2022, the company began by allowing employees to request wages they had already earned via WhatsApp, with funds arriving within 90 minutes.
It has since expanded into a full workforce management platform covering payslips, onboarding, time and attendance, leave management, workforce communication, credit scores, and employee assistance programmes.
Jem now serves more than 250,000 employees across over 200 companies, including Servest, KFC, Meridian, The Capital, Edgars, and Illovo.
The platform has grown recurring revenue by more than 100% year-on-year with approximately 120% net revenue retention and negligible customer churn.
The capital will accelerate the launch of new products already in development. Jem recently released version 2.0 of its employer hub, and has products including rostering and a learning management system currently in beta.
The company plans to expand further into payroll tools, mobile connectivity, insurance, and other employee benefits, services that are largely inaccessible to frontline workers through traditional financial channels.
“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,” said Johan Bosini, venture partner at Quona Capital.
Earlier this year, Jem was named one of Bloomberg’s top startups to watch in Africa, one of only four South African businesses to make the list.
“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.
Everything operates within WhatsApp, which the company claims sets it apart from software that gets purchased but isn’t actually used by workers who don’t sit at computers.
“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.
