Picture a small business in the United States trying to pay a freelancer in Lagos. Simple enough request. Except it isn’t. There are exchange rates to navigate, multiple banking rails to deal with, currency conversion fees, compliance checks across two different financial systems, and no clean way to track whether the money actually arrived. Now multiply that across dozens of countries and hundreds of transactions a month.
That was the problem Chimoney was built to solve. Yesterday, its founder announced it’s shutting down.
One API, 41 Currencies, Four Years
Chimoney was a Nigerian-Canadian fintech that wrapped the entire complexity of cross-border payments into a single connection. One API — a technical bridge between software systems — that let businesses send money across 41 currencies through bank transfers, mobile money, stablecoins, and an open payments protocol called Interledger. Businesses plugged in once and could pay anyone, almost anywhere.
The startup wasn’t small or experimental. It came out of Techstars, one of the world’s most recognised startup accelerators. It secured a financial services licence in Canada called a FINTRAC MSB, then became one of the first companies to receive a Payment Service Provider licence under the Bank of Canada’s new regulatory framework. It served hundreds of businesses across North America, Africa, and Latin America over four years. The product was real, regulated, and working.
On 12 May 2026, founder and CEO Uchi Uchibeke announced he was shutting it down.
“I Spent Too Much Time Building”
Most startup shutdowns come with carefully worded statements about market conditions or strategic pivots. Uchibeke didn’t do that.
“The product worked,” he said in his public post-mortem. “It was distribution. I spent too much of my time building and not enough time making sure people knew what we built.”
That’s a specific and honest diagnosis. Building a cross-border payments infrastructure product is technically hard — getting licences in multiple countries, connecting to different banking systems, keeping everything compliant and running. But selling one is a completely different challenge. Finance teams are risk-averse. Trust is built slowly. A product that handles other people’s money needs to be known, vouched for, and understood before anyone signs a contract. Chimoney had the infrastructure. It didn’t build the sales machine and market presence fast enough to match.
Regulatory and audit costs across multiple jurisdictions proved unsustainable on flat revenue and thin capital. Uchibeke explored acquisitions and partnerships before making the final call. None of them closed on terms that made sense. “So I chose to shut down cleanly instead of dragging the company forward on hope,” he said.
His parting advice to other founders is just as direct. “Either raise properly or bootstrap with a profitable beachhead. I tried to do both and did neither well.”
Doing It the Right Way
What happens after the decision is worth paying attention to. Uchibeke notified investors in February — three months before the public announcement. He told clients in April, giving them time to prepare. Every client wallet balance is being refunded through 31 August 2026, with migration guides published for developers who built products on top of Chimoney’s API. The corporate entity and Payment Service Provider licence are being preserved. “That licence is hard to get, and I believe it will only get harder. I am holding on to it,” Uchibeke said.
For a shutdown, it’s being handled with unusual care.
Already Moving
Uchibeke isn’t stopping. He’s already building APort, a new venture focused on authorisation systems for autonomous AI agents, with something called the Open Agent Passport already introduced. It’s early and the details are thin, but the direction is clear — a founder who spent four years building financial infrastructure for humans is now turning his attention to the infrastructure AI agents will need to operate in the real world.
Chimoney’s story isn’t a cautionary tale about a bad product or a bad founder. It’s something more specific than that — and more useful. Across Africa’s tech ecosystem, there’s a pattern of infrastructure companies that solve real problems but can’t crack distribution in markets where trust is built slowly, and sales cycles are long. Chimoney is the latest. Uchibeke named the problem clearly, which is more than most founders do on the way out. The next person building in this space has one fewer excuse for not seeing it coming.
