Grace Ashiru
Nigerian startup Stabyl has closed a $2.7 million pre-seed round to build institutional-grade foreign exchange infrastructure for banks and payment companies operating across African currency corridors.
The round was led by Konga, which will also serve as Stabyl’s first real-world test case and naira settlement partner through KongaPay. The startup was co-founded by Prince Nnamdi Ekeh, Zachary Schwartzman, and Michael Anyi.
Stabyl is not a consumer payments product. It provides infrastructure that allows payment companies, banks, and large institutions to source foreign exchange and settle transactions faster, currently focusing on the naira-dollar corridor with plans to expand to additional African currency pairs.
The platform uses a central limit order book that lets buyers and sellers of foreign exchange post and match orders automatically — replacing the manual, phone-based processes that treasury teams currently rely on. Settlement can take place through banking rails and stablecoins, with support for USDT and USDC, while wallet infrastructure is provided by DFNS.
The company said it will use the funding for licensing, compliance, and infrastructure as Nigeria’s digital asset rules become clearer. Nigeria’s central bank lifted its crypto banking restrictions last year, and the securities regulator has since begun formalising oversight of virtual asset providers — creating regulatory headroom that Stabyl is moving quickly to occupy.
The startup is targeting one of the most structurally broken problems in African payments: access to FX liquidity. Many payment companies can move money domestically, but still depend on fragmented, slow counterparty networks to settle cross-border transactions. If Stabyl can build the compliance, counterparty depth, and regulatory credibility needed to operate at scale, it could become a core infrastructure layer for fintechs and banks working across the continent’s currency corridors.
