This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.
“We’re just trying to be the onchain Apple.”
Now that’s a banger of a quote.
James Zhang, founder of Jambo, said it to Empire host Santiago Santos in a bonus Empire episode last week.
Jambo, for those of you who may not be aware, is an onchain mobile network. We’ll get more into it in a bit, but Zhang’s points about really looking to give folks access to the digital economy stood out to me.
Right now, Jambo’s biggest user base is in Latin America. Zhang originally thought the biggest user base would perhaps be Africa, but that hasn’t been the case…yet.
As Santos noted, “the next JPMorgan doesn’t look like JPMorgan. It looks like an MVNO with fintech services layered on top.”
People should be able to digitally access all the integrations without ever having to go into, say, a bank branch.
For Jambo, that means not only reaching a user base, but ensuring those users are as loyal as I am to Apple. And that’s where crypto comes in.
And now you know.
Check out the bonus Jambo episode of Empire above
I had a chance to chat with Zhang earlier this week, and I was curious how he’d classify Jambo. Is it a DePIN? Is it more?
What can I say, I’m paid to be nosey.
First let’s start with the basics. Jambo’s been around for a while, having last raised capital from a number of big VCs back in 2022. The round was led by both Pantera and Paradigm, if you want to be specific.
Zhang’s the first one to admit that it was a totally different market when they last raised compared to now, and the team’s been hustling. Even back in 2022, the reception for Jambo was “great,” Zhang noted. There’s an appetite to disrupt the Latin American and African phone markets with a device that is “censorship resistant.”
But after the 2022 raise, Jambo and Zhang had to go into “cockroach mode” to survive the bear. And now, well, we’re here, on the other side.
Zhang wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to raise again, he admitted, especially because he finds this market trickier than a bear market.
“The reason is because in the bear market, we had already raised funding. We had already built our team, and [then] it was just shipping product. And honestly, there weren’t as many … you could say distractions, and … macro is distractions. But when one memecoin gets launched and sucks 90% of liquidity, it’s a little tough on the rest of the market or any narrative, so for us, we just honestly want to see more stability going into a token launch,” he told me.
Zhang said that they’ve never specifically branded as a DePIN though Jambo clearly has elements of that, given that it offers both hardware and networks.
“If you take our entire network together, it becomes one of the largest DePIN networks that users can tap into,” he said.
He’d prefer if you think of them as a consumer-facing product, given that it’s their specialty. Outside of the hardware offerings, they also launched a satellite program earlier this week to “connect all 700,000-plus devices,” he said.
Maybe Zhang’s really not that far off when he says he wants to be the onchain Apple.
