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“We’re just trying to be the Onchain apple.”
That’s one banger of a quote.
James Zhang, founder of Jambo, told Empire host Santiago Santos in a bonus Empire episode last week.
Jambo, for those of you who may not be aware, is a mobile network from Onchain. We’ll get more into that in a moment, but Zhang’s points about really allowing people to access the digital economy stood out to me.
Currently, Jambo’s largest user base is in Latin America. Zhang originally thought the largest user base might 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 access all integrations digitally without ever having to go to a bank branch.
For Jambo, that means not just reaching a user base, but making sure those users are as loyal as I am to Apple. And that’s where Crypto comes in.
And now you know.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twiyuiqv0bs
Watch the bonus Jambo episode of Empire above
I had the chance to chat with Zhang earlier this week and I was curious to see how he would classify Jambo. Is it a depin? Is it more?
What can I say, I was paid to be curious.
Let’s start with the basics first. Jambo has been around for a while, having last raised capital from some major VCs in 2022. The round was led by both Pantera and Paradigma, if you want to be specific.
Zhang is the first to admit that it was a completely different market when they last raised than it is now, and the team is rushing. Even in 2022, the reception for Jambo has been “great,” Zhang noted. There is 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 educate again, he admitted, especially because he sees this market as tougher than a bear market.
“The reason is because we had already raised funding in the bear market. We had already built our team, and [then] It was just shipping the product. And honestly, there weren’t that many… you could say distractions, and… macro is distractions. But when a memecoin launches and sucks 90% of the liquidity, it’s a little tough for the rest of the market or a story, so for us we just honestly want to see more stability going into a token launch,” he told me.
Zhang said they’ve never specifically branded it as a depin, although Jambo clearly has elements of that as it offers both hardware and networking.
“If you take our entire network together, it becomes one of the largest Depin networks that users can tap into,” he said.
He would prefer if you consider them as a product-oriented product, considering that this is their specialty. Beyond the hardware offering, they also launched a satellite program earlier this week to “connect all 700,000+ devices,” he said.
Maybe Zhang really isn’t that far off when he says he wants to be the Onchain apple.