Cape Town’s mobile phone chat startup 2go has almost doubled its workforce since June, as demand for the firm’s offering soars in Africa.

2go, setup in 2006 by then university South African students Alan Wolff and Ashley Peter, says it has over 10 million active users who send more than 6 billion messages per month, mostly on lower-end feature phones in Nigeria and SA.

The service offers both anonymous chat rooms and instant messaging services, while its business model relies on income streams such as advertising. 2go also has a mobile currency, dubbed GoCredits, enabling users to buy content, play games and message each other in in chat rooms.

And the startup is rapidly expanding its workforce. It has doubled from a team of 5 in June this year to about 10, according to Marc Herson, an executive at 2go who has 15 years operational and investment experience in the US, Europe, Asia and Africa.

“We’ve gone on a hiring binge,” Herson told ITWeb Africa.

“We’re really focused on creating an environment of top developers,” Herson added.

As part of its jobs drive, 2go has hired full time Android, BlackBerry and Apple iOS developers to begin building the startup’s smartphone apps.

Herson says 2go plans to replace its current “rudimentary” Android and BlackBerry apps with software made by its new development team. The apps could be online by early next year, said Herson.

“Feature phones have been an incredibly successful platform for us and will continue to be so for the next few years at least,” said Alan Wolff in a press statement.

“(However) research firms such as Informa indicate that by 2015 there will still be 5.6 feature phones in the African market for every one smartphone,” he added.

Amid its high takeup, the startup, though, has not revealed its revenues. Herson merely told ITWeb Africa that 2go is “profitable”.

Furthermore, the team claims it is “self-funded”, with it even using its own server farm, comprising 50 units in Johannesburg.

“We didn’t have money at the beginning, so we had to squeeze every last bit of performance out of our hardware,” says Wolff in a press statement.

Peter added, “We’ve been self-funded from the start and so we’ve learned how to make the most of very scarce resources – we still have a very low ratio of engineers to users.”

On what appears to be a shoe-string budget, 2go has, nevertheless, racked up a fierce following in Africa, with over 9 million users in Nigeria and 200,000 in Kenya.

According to research firm World Wide Worx, it is also the youngest mobile instant messaging tool to emerge on the measurement radar in South Africa, as 2go has close to a million adult users in the country.