Nigerian fintech Stabyl has emerged from stealth with a $2.7 million pre-seed round led by e-commerce giant Konga, aimed at solving one of African finance’s least visible but most persistent problems: the difficulty banks and payment companies face in sourcing foreign currency reliably.
What Stabyl Actually Does
Stabyl is not a consumer app, and it does not move cross-border payments directly. It operates one layer below that, as a liquidity exchange where banks, payment service providers, and other financial institutions can source foreign exchange and settle transactions faster. The platform runs on a central limit order book that automatically matches buy and sell orders for currency, replacing the phone calls and manual negotiations treasury teams typically rely on to compare rates across multiple banks and liquidity providers.
For now, the company is concentrating on the naira-dollar corridor, one of the continent’s largest and most volatile currency pairs, with plans to expand into additional African currencies as its regulatory approvals grow. Settlement happens through both conventional banking rails and stablecoins, with the platform currently supporting USDT and USDC. Wallet infrastructure for the digital asset side comes from DFNS, a multi-party computation provider, while Konga’s payments arm, KongaPay, handles naira settlement.
The Problem It’s Targeting
Nigeria’s central bank reported a net foreign exchange inflow of $6.92 billion in February 2026, yet the system’s institutions’ access to that liquidity remains fragmented. Payment companies and banks often juggle several relationships just to secure dollars at workable rates, a process that adds delay and cost to transactions that should clear quickly. Stabyl’s pitch is that consolidating these participants onto one platform creates a deeper, more accessible liquidity pool than any single institution could build alone.
The company’s revenue model reflects that ambition. Rather than profiting from the exchange rate spread the way many Nigerian FX businesses do, Stabyl charges a flat take rate on transactions processed through its platform, kept deliberately low to encourage institutions to route more volume through it.
Who’s Behind It
Stabyl was founded by Prince Nnamdi Ekeh, formerly Co-CEO of Konga Group, alongside Zachary Schwartzman and Michael Anyi. The idea traces back to 2021 and 2022, when Ekeh and Schwartzman were Oxford MBA classmates trading ideas about how stablecoin technology could address Africa’s recurring FX inefficiencies. Anyi, a software engineer with roughly a decade of experience building financial infrastructure, later joined to help turn those conversations into a working platform.
Konga’s role goes beyond writing the check. The company also serves as Stabyl’s naira settlement partner and first real-world commercial deployment, giving the startup an immediate use case to prove its model before approaching other institutions.
Why It Matters
Liquidity access is one of the quieter constraints on African cross-border commerce, but it shapes nearly everything downstream of it, from how quickly a remittance clears to how predictably an importer can price goods. If Stabyl can attract enough liquidity providers and regulated counterparties to make its order book genuinely deep, it could become part of the infrastructure layer that other fintechs and banks build on. That outcome still depends on the harder work ahead: securing licenses, earning institutional trust, and proving the model holds up once volume moves beyond its first deployment with Konga.
