Nigerian Fintech Stabyl Secures $2.7 Million to Solve Africa’s FX Infrastructure Challenge
A new player just stepped out of the shadows to fix a problem most people never even knew existed. Stabyl, a Nigerian exchange platform built to give banks, payment service providers, and traders access to deep FX stablecoin liquidity, has emerged from stealth with $2.7 million in pre-seed funding.
The round was led by Konga, the e-commerce company that will also serve as Stabyl’s first real-world implementation partner, putting its infrastructure to work through KongaPay’s licensed settlement rails.
What makes the Stabyl fintech story interesting isn’t a flashy consumer app, it’s the invisible plumbing behind African payments. While fintechs across the continent have made moving money look effortless, sourcing the actual foreign exchange before that money settles remains a messy, manual affair. Treasury teams typically spend hours calling banks and liquidity partners to compare rates, often watching prices shift before a deal is even confirmed.
Stabyl’s answer is a central limit order book, a transparent marketplace where buyers and sellers of foreign exchange can automatically post and match orders, cutting out the back-and-forth and speeding up execution. Co-founder Ekeh used Konga itself as an example: when the company’s treasury team needs FX, it normally has to reach out to multiple counterparties, and by the time approvals come through, the market may have already moved against them.
The startup, co-founded by Ekeh, Schwartzman, and Michael Anyi, isn’t chasing everyday consumers. Instead, it’s positioning itself as liquidity infrastructure, sitting behind the scenes where banks and PSPs source the dollars, naira, and stablecoins they need to keep transactions flowing. Settlement happens across both traditional banking rails and blockchain networks, with KongaPay handling naira settlement and DFNS, a multi-party computation wallet provider, managing the crypto side. The platform currently supports USDT and USDC, though it says its infrastructure remains blockchain-agnostic.
In a region where capital often gets “trapped” between instant payment confirmations and slow settlement, Stabyl is betting that the real opportunity lies not in another payments app, but in becoming the liquidity backbone African fintechs quietly depend on.
