Bamboo YC Application

Winter 2020Active

Bamboo went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2020 batch as a Fintech company. Below: what the company does, who founded it, and its application to YC, reconstructed question by question in the real YC form.

YC batch: Winter 2020
Industry: FintechConsumer Finance
Team size: 14
Status: Active
Launched: 2020

Founders

Richmond BasseyFounder
Yanmo OmorogbeFounder

What Bamboo does

Bamboo is the first online brokerage service that gives wealthy Africans and their wealth managers direct access to the US and global securities. We’re building Fidelity for the African continent. For wealthy Africans and their asset managers, investing in the global capital markets is cumbersome, expensive and practically inaccessible. In Nigeria, Africa's largest economy and home to 30% of all the wealth in Sub Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa), 99.99% of the investing population do not have access to invest globally. Even for the 0.01%, if you wanted to buy a US stock, you’d have to call your asset manager who would then call an international broker to execute a trade. This is inefficient & expensive! We have a mobile app that allows individuals trade the US stock markets by themselves and a brokerage tool for asset managers to execute trades directly & manage multilple portfolios seamlessly.

Bamboo's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Bamboo, Winter 2020 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Bamboo

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Online brokerage for African investors

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

We built Bamboo to give wealthy Africans and their asset managers direct access to US and global stock markets. Our mobile app lets individuals trade US stocks themselves. We also offer a tool to asset managers to execute trades and manage multiple portfolios without the usual middlemen and costs.

Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?

We live in Lagos, Nigeria and the company is based here now and will stay based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We are based in Lagos because it's the largest economy in Africa and home to a significant portion of the region's wealth. The problem we solve is local, so building here puts us close to our users and market.

21 more answers in the full application

Founders, Progress, Idea, Equity, Curious, Batch Preference are in the full version. Create a free account to open it in YC Insights, next to every other YC batch.

See full application

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the real Bamboo YC application?

No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from Bamboo's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like Bamboo would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.