Grace Ashiru
Nairobi fintech Cloud9 has raised $500,000 in equity from Alliance, a New York crypto accelerator and founder community; the cheque forms part of a pre-seed round that’s still open, and it takes Cloud9’s disclosed funding to $1 million.
Cloud9 is young; it’s also been busy. Tesh Mbaabu and Mesongo Sibuti announced the company in October 2025, less than two weeks after stepping back from day-to-day roles at social commerce startup Chpter. It now sells to businesses and younger digital users, offering multicurrency accounts, cross-border payments and virtual cards.
In May, Cloud9 bought ticketing platform M-Tickets for about KES 100 million ($773,000). In August, it bought Chpter itself in an all-stock deal, adding about 4,500 businesses that already sell through WhatsApp and Instagram. The idea behind both deals is to buy platforms where customers already transact, then add financial services on top.
The founders have scaled (and failed) before. Their earlier company, B2B e-commerce platform MarketForce, raised over $42 million, operated in Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda, and served over 270,000 merchants before it shut down.
