Fintech startup Stabyl has officially emerged from stealth mode, securing a $2.7 million pre-seed funding round led by e-commerce giant Konga to deploy institutional-grade foreign exchange infrastructure across African markets, reports ITREALMS.
The company’s platform is engineered to enable commercial banks, payment service providers (PSPs), and tier-1 financial institutions to access consolidated liquidity pools while radically compressing transaction settlement times.
The venture traces its roots to the University of Oxford, where co-founders Prince Nnamdi Ekeh (then Co-CEO of Konga Group) and fellow MBA student Zachary Schwartzman began collaborating on how stablecoin technology could dismantle deep-seated inefficiencies in African foreign exchange ecosystems.
The team later attracted veteran software engineer Michael Anyi, whose decade of experience constructing financial infrastructure successfully translated those early concepts into a market-ready financial marketplace.
Stabyl’s market entry arrives at a critical economic juncture. While net foreign exchange inflow into Nigeria’s economy climbed to $6.92 billion in February 2026 according to the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) monthly economic report, the backend routing architecture remains highly fragmented. Payment service providers, local banks, and major corporations currently rely on multiple, manual bilateral relationships to source foreign exchange.
Corporate leadership emphasized that Stabyl is neither a consumer-facing mobile application nor a retail cross-border remittance service. Instead, the technology directly intervenes at the exact structural point where financial institutions must source wholesale foreign exchange before an outbound payment can be initiated.
Under the legacy framework, when an enterprise requires substantial foreign exchange, its treasury unit must manually contact multiple banking partners and independent liquidity providers to benchmark competitive rates. By the time internal approvals are secured and counterparties finalize terms, volatile market rates often shift, forcing the treasury team to either abort the transaction or settle at less favorable prices.
Stabyl effectively replaces these manual negotiations with a high-performance Central Limit Order Book (CLOB). This automated digital marketplace allows institutional buyers and sellers of foreign currency to seamlessly post and match orders in real time.
Co-founder Michael Anyi explained that the platform democratizes the transaction flow, allowing every onboarded participant to instantly create an order that is systematically matched and queued. This programmatic automation entirely eliminates the manual labor, extensive phone calls, and delayed transaction holds that historically defined the local FX ecosystem.
The startup aggregates its core liquidity from participating PSPs and established financial institutions. Furthermore, Stabyl maintains strategic, proprietary liquidity reserves in collaboration with selected institutional partners to guarantee order fulfillment even during periods when organic market demand outstrips natural platform supply.
Settlement on the Stabyl network occurs simultaneously across legacy banking infrastructure and modern cryptographic rails. For traditional fiat operations, Stabyl has secured an official partnership with KongaPay to oversee naira settlement. On the digital asset side, critical secure wallet infrastructure is powered by multi-party computation (MPC) wallet architect DFNS.
While the system currently supports major stablecoins like Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC), management affirmed that the baseline infrastructure is strictly blockchain-agnostic. The platform dynamically routes transactions over specific distributed networks based on execution cost, speed, finality metrics, and the custom compliance requirements of its institutional clientele.
Unlike traditional bureau de change operators that generate corporate revenue by pocketing wide exchange rate spreads, Stabyl does not hold inventory to exploit pricing arbitrage. The company instead charges a flat, highly competitive take rate on each transaction cleared through its order book to encourage high-volume throughput from heavy financial institutions.
Stabyl’s market entry aligns with a noticeably supportive regulatory landscape for digital assets in West Africa. Following the CBN's decision to lift the prohibition on cryptocurrency banking relationships in late 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) introduced the Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme (ARIP), successfully drawing virtual asset service providers into a structured national compliance framework.
Addressing the competitive environment alongside prominent regional payment rails like Onafriq, Yellow Card, and Fincra, Stabyl clarified that it views these fintech operators as natural anchor customers rather than direct market competitors. The startup's role is to provide wholesale liquidity to payment processors and banks, aiming to expand the overall transactional capacity of the African market.
The newly secured pre-seed capital injection will be deployed to accelerate international regulatory licensing, continuous platform engineering, compliance operations, and strategic geographic expansion. Beyond serving as lead investor, Konga serves as the critical anchor ecosystem for the startup, supplying both the official naira settlement architecture via KongaPay and providing the fintech with its initial high-volume, commercial enterprise deployment pipeline. While Stabyl is launching with an initial focus on the high-volume NGN/USD trading corridor, the company plans to systematically introduce additional African regional currency pairs as localized regulatory approvals are successfully secured.
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