Table Of Content
Key Takeaways
- Daya raised $2.4 million in pre-seed funding led by Hivemind Capital with participation from Aptos Foundation and other investors.
- The startup is building stablecoin-powered infrastructure for African businesses operating globally.
- The raise reflects growing investor belief that stablecoins are becoming core payment infrastructure rather than speculative assets.
- The bigger story is not the funding itself but why capital continues to flow into African stablecoin payment startups.
Daya, a Nigerian stablecoin-native payments company, has raised $2.4 million in pre-seed funding. The funds will be used to expand the company’s cross-border financial operating layer.
The round was led by Hivemind Capital, a New York-based crypto VC firm founded by a former Citi executive. The round also saw participation from Lattice, an early-stage crypto VC; Alliance, a crypto accelerator that has now backed Daya; and Globelink, a Singapore-based Web3 payments investor.
Daya’s Business Model
Earlier this month, Aptos Foundation, which also participated in this round, previously partnered with Daya and HashKey MENA to power an Africa-UAE payment corridor.
According to Daya co-founder, Tomiwa Aleph Lasebikan, the round was oversubscribed. This wave of funding is indicative of the growing interest in African fintechs developing stablecoin infrastructure that connects African businesses to global finance.
With Daya, businesses can collect payments, convert currencies, including USD, HKD, and CNY, hold funds in stablecoin wallets, and make cross-border transactions.
Daya also offers API solutions for developers looking to integrate this infrastructure into their products.
The platform, created in October 2025 by Tomiwa “Aleph” Lasebikan and Paul Joe, has reportedly seen a 40% month-on-month growth in 2026.
In its official statement, Lattice and the investors tell the public;
We’re excited to back Aleph, PJ, and the team as they build the financial infrastructure layer that African businesses deserve.
The Real Story: Africa’s Infrastructure Race
Daya’s funding is the latest ripple in the wave of stablecoin infrastructure and integration sweeping Africa.
Earlier this month, Flutterwave secured a strategic investment from Ripple as part of its Series E round. The agreement came with a plan to integrate Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin and XRP Ledger infrastructure into Flutterwave’s payment systems.
In February 2026, Onafriq partnered with Conduit to support stablecoin settlements between Africa and international markets. In May 2026, Mastercard announced a partnership with Yellow Card, Africa’s largest licensed provider of stablecoin infrastructure, to expand stablecoin-enabled payment services across the continent.
Investors are increasingly backing companies that solve the mechanics of moving money rather than companies betting on the value of digital assets.
While payment systems such as PAPSS have helped reduce reliance on correspondent banking and third-currency settlement, stablecoins are increasingly used by businesses and individuals alike as practical dollar rails in markets with currency volatility and fragmented liquidity.
Why Cross-Border Payments Remain Africa’s Biggest Fintech Problem
The business case for stablecoin infrastructure starts with the simple reality that moving money across African borders is still slow and expensive.
This is pointed out in Lattice’s statement.
If you run a business in Nigeria and need to pay a supplier in the United States, the process is genuinely broken. You start by converting Naira to dollars through a Bureau de Change – a process that takes one to two days, requires hunting multiple brokers for rates, and doesn’t happen on weekends. Then you wait another one to two days for those dollars to settle into your Nigerian bank account. Then you initiate a wire transfer that takes four to five more days. Total cost: 5-10% in fees. Total time: anywhere from four business days to two weeks.
African business owners operating across multiple countries and markets have to rely on this system to move their money. This scale of the problem is significant, but so is the scale of the opportunity.
For Globelink, one of the investors, this is indicated in the scale of Africa’s trade with Asia. Globelink’s Chief Investment Officer, Kent Cai, cited Afreximbank data showing that Africa exported $189.5 billion in goods to Asia in 2024. Asia accounted for 28.5% of the continent’s $769 billion in imports. Nearly $410 billion flows annually in two-way trade-linked flows between the two continents.
The remittance cost to send $200 to sub-Saharan Africa is between 7% – 10% for recipients, nearly the UN Sustainable Development Goal target of 3%. Stablecoin-powered infrastructure directly targets that gap.
Stablecoins Are Becoming the New Financial Rails
Much of the coverage around stablecoins in Africa still frames them as a crypto story. That framing is becoming outdated.
In 2025, stablecoins processed an estimated $28 trillion in transaction value. That figure, which has most use cases tied to payments and remittances, is projected to reach $1.5 quadrillion in 2035.
African markets are leading in global stablecoin adoption. In 2024, stablecoins accounted for 43% cryptocurrency transaction volume in Sub-Saharan Africa. Nigeria, the largest market, recorded almost $22 billion in transaction volume between July 2023 and June 2024.
Stablecoins have displaced Bitcoin as the most popular digital asset in South Africa, Africa’s second-largest crypto market.
Sub-Saharan Africa recorded over $205 billion in on-chain value from July 2024 to June 2025. On-chain analysis reveals that stablecoins are being used in high-value transactions between Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
Nigeria and Ethiopia ranked sixth and twelfth, respectively, in Chainalysis’s 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index.
The companies building on this trend are positioning stablecoins not as an asset class but as settlement infrastructure.
Why Investors Are Backing Stablecoin Startups Now
This increase in funding and development comes at a time of improving regulation and demonstrated product-market fit in Africa.
Kenya signed the Virtual Asset Service Providers Bill into law in October 2025 and has proposed the 2026 Finance Bill. South Africa’s FSCA has provided a regulatory and licensing framework for crypto firms, and its draft 2026 Capital Flow Management Regulations is an attempt to expand that framework.
Mauritius’ VAITOS Act is one of Africa’s earliest comprehensive crypto frameworks. Rwanda and Zimbabwe have also made moves to regulate crypto in 2026.
Nigeria, where Daya is headquartered, has moved from outright crypto skepticism toward cautious engagement with digital asset licensing and has advanced a new crypto bill.
The demand question has been settled. Investors see Daya as part of a continent-wide transformation in payments infrastructure. Growing intercontinental trade and the expanding use of stablecoins for cross-border commerce have created a demand for more efficient settlement networks.
The Challenge Investors Are Watching
Not everything is clear sailing. As adoption grows, basic services become commoditized, and margins compress.
Daya is not alone in betting on stablecoins to fix Africa’s cross-border payments problem. Bridge, acquired by Stripe in 2025, has built similar infrastructure.
Visa, Mastercard, and Western Union are exploring stablecoins and stablecoin settlement pilots. Mastercard acquired BVNK, a UK-based stablecoin neobank, to this effect.
Yellow Card, Flutterwave, Paga, Juicyway, and Conduit are all Africa-centric businesses building comparable infrastructure.
The likely differentiators in this race will be the depth of banking relationships, the breadth of regulatory licenses, the quality of enterprise integrations, and the ability to embed into workflows that businesses will not want to leave.
As Daya co-founder Paul Joe put it: “The winners in this market will not just own the payment rails; they will own the workflows.”
Why This Raise Matters
The first phase of Africa’s stablecoin story was adoption; individuals used stablecoins as a lifeline against currency volatility and for cheaper remittances.
As the market grew, governments that shunned the technology began to build frameworks around it, ushering in the second phase of regulation.
The third phase, now underway, is the infrastructure phase. Companies are building the systems that connect businesses, banks, payment networks, and stablecoins into a single operating layer.
If startups like Daya succeed at scale, African SMEs gain cheaper access to global markets, reducing some of the cross-border trade friction, and the continent’s businesses become meaningfully less dependent on expensive legacy banking infrastructure.
