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Two years ago, Ifelade Ayodele began his mornings glued to the app store. He refreshed the dashboard, checking how many people had downloaded Blaaiz, the cross-border payments startup he had launched in 2023, since he last looked. Blaaiz had about 500 users at the time, but Ayodele would tell you that he knew most of them by their first name. Today, Ayodele says he no longer monitors app downloads. The customers he keeps tabs on are banks, fintechs, payment companies, and financial institutions, integrating the payment infrastructure he built. To understand how he switched from building a consumer-facing app to a payment infrastructure, you have to go back further than Blaaiz’s first version, a Telegram bot, and beyond the day he decided to quit his job in 2024. In 2022, Ayodele worked as a management consultant at Accenture’s UK office, advising financial institutions and working on projects that took him across multiple countries. He recalled that while travelling for work, he encountered the familiar challenge of cross-border payments: exchanging currencies was expensive, and transferring money digitally was slow. “What was most apparent to me was the symptoms,” Ayodele told TechCabal in an interview on Thursday. “Why can’t I change money easily? Why is it impossible to get fair rates? I was dealing with the symptoms. For me, it was all about creating an app that had a smooth user experience.” Convinced that the problem was worth fixing himself, Ayodele left the certainty of consulting, teamed up with his co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO), Gbenga Oni, and started building Blaaiz. Blaaiz is building in Nigeria’s cross-border payments market, where personal remittance inflows reached $20.93 billion in 2024, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). The size of these flows presents an opportunity for companies building the infrastructure that powers them. Day 1: Too many hats and the Telegram bot On his first day as a founder, Ayodele was stepping into the unknown. Leaving Accenture meant walking away from a stable consulting career into uncertainty. There was no roadmap or assurance that anyone would use what he and Oni were about to build. “It was exciting to try out something that I had not done before,” he said. “But I was also anxious. We had no clear path as to what we were going to do or how this was going to turn out, but we decided to give it a shot.” With just two people building the company, job titles became blurred. Ayodele said that at the beginning, he was the CEO, but he was also the product manager, business analyst, compliance lead, and the person speaking to regulators about licences. “There were no clear KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), no structure,” he said. “Anything that came up, we just got it done.” The first iteration of Blaaiz was a Telegram chatbot. Customers looking to send money would message the bot, choose from a list of options, receive a payment link, and continue the transaction through a series of prompts. To find those first customers, Ayodele told TechCabal that he leaned on his network and posted the Telegram link on his WhatsApp status almost every day, asking friends to try the product and inform him of what was broken. “At that point, it was not about making money; it was about getting people to trust what I was building,” he said. That trust eventually gave Blaaiz enough momentum to launch a standalone mobile app in early 2024. Day 500: The app was not the answer By early 2024, Blaaiz had outgrown the Telegram bot. Ayodele explained that after months of navigating regulatory requirements, Blaaiz launched as a standalone mobile app, focused on retail cross-border payments. Initially, Blaaiz supported the Canada-Nigeria payment corridor before expanding to Europe and the UK through partnerships with Tier 1 banks, whose names Ayodele declined to disclose. However, the launch of the new app only introduced a new obsession for Ayodele. “There was a little bit of obsession with how many downloads we had in a day and where they were from,” he said. “At some point, I knew all our customers by their first names.” That closeness gave him an unfiltered view of what customers genuinely wanted. Ayodele said he observed that customers wanted more payment corridors and more supported currencies. Blaaiz could satisfy some of those requests, but some required infrastructure that the startup did not have access to. Curious to discover if the problem was unique to Blaaiz, Ayodele said he began studying about 10 competing remittance apps, which he did not disclose. He stated that many platforms supported a handful of payment corridors, while promising more countries and services labelled as coming soon. He realised that the bottleneck was the underlying infrastructure. “It became obvious that the rails the customers wanted, we couldn’t provide them in the way they wanted them,” he said. “It began to dawn on us that it was not a Blaaiz-specific problem.” Ayodele concluded that the real opportunity lay in building the infrastructure that would allow remittance apps, fintechs, and payment companies to expand into new markets without doing the heavy lifting themselves. By late 2024, Blaaiz began repositioning itself from an app that helped consumers move money to a payments infrastructure company that integrated with banks and payment rails to enable financial institutions to offer cross-border payments to their customers. “There was a bit of a conflict in our messaging, but we knew what we wanted, and then we just stayed true to our new value proposition,” Ayodele said. In his telling, that transition was facilitated by the heavy investment the team put in while building the consumer app. He added that moving from a consumer-facing app to selling infrastructure came with challenges, including more exhaustive due diligence processes and strengthening its compliance position across jurisdictions to secure banking partnerships and users. Day 1000: Playing the long game By 2025, the challenges that came with Blaaiz’s pivot were beginning to pay off. Blaaiz had become profitable,
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There are no fixed prices in Nigeria’s commodity markets. Buy a basket of tomatoes from one trader and walk a few stalls down; the next trader might quote a different price, and the basket itself might not contain the same quantity. For consumers who do not regularly visit markets, navigating that uncertainty can be frustrating. It was this kind of uncertainty that caught the attention of Ademuyiwa Taofeek, one of Bango’s co-founders, during the 2024 Sallah festivities. The holiday is a Muslim celebration marked by communal prayers, family gatherings, and cooking bulk meals. While shopping for baskets of tomatoes and peppers in Lagos, he observed that prices were higher than in producing regions like Jos, a city in Plateau State, North-Central Nigeria. When Taofeek questioned the price difference, he received a familiar explanation: it was due to the logistics cost of transporting produce from northern farming communities to Lagos. Curious, Taofeek decided to test the assumption himself. He sourced the same commodities from Jos, paid to transport them to Lagos, and discovered that even after transport costs, he still spent less than he would have buying them locally. The experience made him believe that consumers have little visibility into what food commodities cost outside the markets closest to them, and that was a problem. When he shared the experience with Caleb Adenegan, who recounted the incident to TechCabal and would later become Taofeek’s co-founder, the pair began discussing how technology could help close that information gap. Before Bango, Adenegan had experimented with building products, including Curri AI, an educational tool that helped teachers create lesson plans and classroom materials and Weeb, a social networking product. Together, Taofeek and Adenegan saw an opportunity to create a platform where buyers could share what they paid for food commodities, where they bought them, and who sold them. That idea became Bango, a community-driven platform launched in November 2025. Adenegan told TechCabal in an interview in February that the model mirrors how Nigerians have traditionally shared market information. “Back in the day, the older generation spoke to each other,” Adenegan said on the call. “People would tell their neighbours where they got an item cheaper. Now the information system is fractured, and it leaves room for sellers to say any price and buyers don’t have an option but to buy it.” Bango operates in Nigeria’s food and drink market, which is estimated to reach around $98.97 billion by 2033. A 2019 report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) revealed that 56.65% of total household expenditure was spent on food. Bango is trying to carve out a place in that market by helping consumers make more informed food purchasing decisions. How Bango turns market intelligence into a product When users open the web app, they see a feed of recent price submissions from other users. A user can search for a specific commodity, such as a basket of tomatoes, and then see results that display a range of prices tied to a market, including its location, the seller’s name and phone number, and the date and quantity of purchase. Bango dashboard. Image source: TechCabal The data is submitted by buyers of the commodity. To submit an entry, a user inputs the commodity name, the price they paid, quantity, market name, state, and location, and attaches a photo. Those submissions become part of the database that future buyers rely on, thereby creating a feedback loop. However, Adenegan explained that as users adopted the platform, the founders discovered that information alone did not solve the problem. A buyer could find a lower price for tomatoes, peppers, or onions on Bango, but that did not necessarily mean they could access those commodities. “We have tried to inform people and tell them that these commodities are cheaper elsewhere with Bango,” Adenegan said. “That helps solve the problem to an extent. But what if we can guarantee you this price directly from the farmers?” That question led to the development of Shopr by Bango, a commerce layer built on top of the startup’s price intelligence infrastructure. Currently operational only in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, Adenegan explained that Shopr enables users to purchase commodities directly through Bango. He said the startup sources produce from a network of farmers and suppliers and has processed between 40 and 50 orders since launching in June. The service also includes what Adenegan described as shared delivery. Rather than treating each order as a standalone delivery, the company groups orders from customers in the same locality and distributes the logistics costs across them. To make the model work, Adenegan stated that certain commodities were allocated to specific ordering days. Customers within a particular location are then encouraged to place orders on those days, enabling Bango to aggregate demand and reduce fulfilment costs. The startup currently handles deliveries through its own logistics infrastructure, a decision, Adenegan said, was deliberate. “We cannot outsource understanding that process to a third party,” he said. “ We need to understand the process ourselves before we can say we want to bring in a third party to partner with us on it.” Shopr is not the final piece of Bango’s strategy. According to Adenegan, Bango is preparing to launch Bango Market Day, a waitlist-based system that allows buyers to collectively purchase large volumes of commodities. Under the model, users indicate the quantity of a commodity they want to buy, after which Bango aggregates demand and coordinates supply through its farmer network. “Our major aim as an entity is to make sure that people can get cheap food commodities at a very low price regardless of how far the market might be from the person,” he said. How the model operates Bango currently generates revenue through Shopr, where customers pay both a service fee and a delivery fee on each order. According to Adenegan, the startup has grown largely through word-of-mouth, attracting up to 2,500 users. Bango’s Shopr competes directly with commerce platforms like Chowdeck, Mano, GoLemon, and other quick commerce
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Many remarkable stories can trace their beginnings to the University of Oxford. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote much of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings there. Between 2021 and 2022, a conversation about stablecoins between two Master of Business Administration (MBA) students on the school’s basketball court sparked a story that would eventually become a startup. At the time of the conversation, Prince Nnamdi Ekeh was the co-CEO of Konga Group following the merger with his online marketplace Yudala, giving him a front-row seat to the challenges of payments and foreign exchange. Zachary Schwartzman, the second of the courtside pair, had gotten interested in African tech after covering the initial public offerings (IPOs) of Jumia as a Wall Street analyst. Their conversation circled the use of stablecoins and how they could solve real problems in markets like Nigeria and across Africa. Years later, they would start Stablyl, a fintech startup co-founded by Ekeh, Schwartzman, and Michael Anyi, a software engineer with over a decade of experience building financial infrastructure. Emerging from stealth with a $2.7 million pre-seed investment led by Konga, the startup is a liquidity exchange for financial institutions and payment service providers, built to make foreign exchange liquidity easier to access and settlements nearly instantaneous. Net foreign exchange inflow into Nigeria’s economy was $6.92 billion in February 2026, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria’s monthly economic report. Yet, the infrastructure through which that liquidity moves is fragmented, with payment service providers, banks and large institutions relying on multiple relationships to source foreign exchange. “Our goal is to connect these participants on one platform, creating the deepest and most accessible liquidity pool on the continent,” Schwartzman said. How Stabyl works Stabyl is neither a consumer-facing app nor a cross-border payments platform. The problem it aims to solve lies at the point where financial institutions source foreign exchange before a payment can be made. Ekeh illustrated this with the example of a large institution like Konga. He explained that when the e-commerce company needs foreign exchange, its treasury team typically reaches out to multiple banks, payment service providers, and liquidity providers to compare rates and source liquidity. By the time approvals are received and counterparties respond, market prices may already have shifted, forcing the process to begin again or settle at a less favourable rate. Stabyyl’s solution is to replace those fragmented bilateral negotiations with a central limit order book (CLOB), in which buyers and sellers of foreign exchange can automatically post and match orders. “Everybody on Stabyl can create a transaction, and that transaction gets matched and queued immediately, Anyi told TechCabal in an interview on Friday. “That entire process of having to make calls, hold transactions, figure out rates and do all this manual labour is completely removed.” The startup said its liquidity is aggregated from participating payment service providers (PSPs) and financial institutions, and maintains its own liquidity reserves with unnamed selected partners to ensure liquidity remains available when demand exceeds natural market activity. On Stabyl, settlement occurs across both traditional banking infrastructure and blockchain networks. For fiat transactions, Stabyl noted that it partnered with KongaPay as its official naira settlement partner. On the stablecoin settlement side, wallet infrastructure is provided by DFNS, a multi-party computation (MPC) wallet provider. The company noted that it currently supports USDT (Tether) and USDC (USD Coin) stablecoins. Still, it maintained that its infrastructure is blockchain-agnostic, selecting networks based on cost, speed, settlement finality, and the needs of its institutional clients. “Stabyl is connecting stablecoin rails with fiat banking rails because you can’t separate the two,” Ekeh noted. “Stablecoins are great, but they’re not great on their own. You still need to convert back to local currency.” In practice, when a PSP deposits naira on Stabyl through KongaPay, it can then place an order at its preferred exchange rate or match one already available on the platform. Once the transaction is executed, participants can settle and withdraw in either fiat currency or stablecoins. For institutions that want to integrate the infrastructure directly into their treasury systems, Stabyl also noted that it provides Application Programming Interface (APIs) that offer programmatic access to its liquidity pool. The business of building the infrastructure Many FX businesses in Nigeria make money by capitalising on the exchange rate spread, meaning they buy currencies at a low rate and sell them at a higher rate. Rather than holding inventory and earning a spread, Stabyl said it charges a take rate on each transaction processed through the platform. The company did not disclose the figure but said it intentionally keeps it low to incentivise institutions to push more volume through the platform. “What we want to do is grow the liquidity pot,” Schwartzman said. “That is where we see the opportunity: by growing liquidity for clients. We believe that will allow clients to provide more liquidity, do more trades, and be more successful.” Stabyl’s emergence from stealth comes as Nigeria’s regulatory environment for digital assets has shifted considerably in its favour. The CBN lifted its ban on cryptocurrency transactions in 2023, and the Securities and Exchange Commission followed with its Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme, bringing virtual asset service providers into a formal compliance framework. “The regulatory direction is clear,” Schwartzman said. “We would rather build this infrastructure correctly from the start, working hand-in-hand with regulators, than arrive late to a settled market.” In the same space, companies like Onafriq, Yellow Card and Fincra are building payment infrastructure across Africa. Stabyl, however, maintained that these companies are its potential customers, not competitors. “We’re trying to provide liquidity to other liquidity providers, foreign exchange companies, payment service providers and financial institutions,” Schwartzman said. “So, if we look at everything as a pie, we’re not trying to gain market share from this pie. We’re creating more dough to make this a bigger pie for everyone.” The company stated that the pre-seed funding from Konga will be used for regulatory licensing, infrastructure build, and compliance. Beyond capital and being its naira
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